


First Burn

by Half_SubmergedinPurgatory



Series: Cell Block Tango [2]
Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alpha James "Rhodey" Rhodes, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Angst, Beta Edwin Jarvis, Cell Block Tango Verse, Clinging to the Past Ruins Local Man's Life, Coming Up Next Stane is a Bad Bad Man, Gen, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, Kidnapping, Non-Traditional Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Omega Tony Stark, Pack Dynamics, Pre-WinterIron, Secret Omega Tony Stark, Tony Loves Spies and Spy Lore
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-15
Updated: 2019-03-11
Packaged: 2019-05-07 11:30:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 32,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14670183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Half_SubmergedinPurgatory/pseuds/Half_SubmergedinPurgatory
Summary: Tony Stark is born to the finest line of Omegas there are, but he never gets to be one. He's a Beta - trained to be one since he was young. And he's fine with that.He's fine with that.Even though he's lonely, even though he doesn't have the pack he's supposed to, even though his parents die and he's taken to Afghanistan, he's FINE.(Follows Tony Stark through childhood, MIT, kidnappings, and Afghanistan as he struggles to conceal his nature and finds a few people that he wishes he could tell)





	1. Don't

**Author's Note:**

> Since this is a pretty big AU series, here's a codex of sorts for the world!
> 
> There are 3 "assignments" a person can have: **Alpha, Beta, and Omega**.
> 
>  **Alphas** are defined by their peppery/crisp emotional scent signatures/pheromones. Their scent is forceful and has a lot of throw - if an Alpha is feeling something, you're gonna know all about it! Alphas are very action-oriented, weak to emotional cues from their pack members, and tend to be aggressive/dominating in the face of social challenges. Their body language is LOUD though they have low self-awareness about it.
> 
>  **Betas** are very independent and emotionally stable. They only tend to form weak pack bonds and don't respond much to emotional cues. Their scents are really variable and hard to trace, therefore they rely heavily on body language as adults to get their points across.
> 
>  **Omegas** are defined by their rich and complex scents that force a physiological reaction of shallow "scent-testing" breaths. Omega scents are "fascinating" and influence others to empathize with them, therefore there is a strong social stigma against Omegas using emotional manipulation deceptively or for selfish reasons. Like Alphas, Omegas are weak to the emotional cues of pack and are socially dominant big personalities, though their approach is more subversive than Alphas. Omegas mostly express themselves with scent!
> 
> The Alpha and Omega assignments are further subdivided by " **lineage strength** " which is a government-mandated measure that looks at how strongly their pheromones affect others and how strongly they react to pheromones. Stronger lineage = stronger reaction. The measure is used by the public to describe a person's personality and pack dynamics and is basically a form of stereotyping that is often inaccurate.
> 
> The strongest lineage for Alpha's is " **Redline Alpha** ", while the strongest for Omega's is " **Queen Bitch** ", though this is considered an archaic lineage that nobody in North America acknowledges as being real. 
> 
> Pack instinct is a powerful goddamn thing in Omegas and Alphas, akin to the human need for touch except stronger. Omegas tend to centre pack on locations, while Alphas tend to choose people to very loyal to. Betas always pick both people and a place, though it applies to fewer people and more weakly than it does in Alphas or Omegas. 
> 
> Pack can be a fairly loose structure composed of weak bonds or something much tighter! Most people need support from their pack and prefer having at least a few tight bonds - not having them is seen as asocial and bad. Pack is VERY IMPORTANT in North America!!! 
> 
> This world has a lot of much more detailed rules, but most other exposition will be dealt with in-story.

In most of Europe and North America, Maria Carbonell’s kind doesn’t exist. Oh sure, there are Strong Omegas. There are even unusually influential ones. There are historical records of Omegas that go above and beyond what’s expected of their emotional influence.  
  
But Maria’s kind don’t exist in an...official capacity ( _ridiculous, really, when assignments and lineages had to be recorded for the federal government, when lying on your papers was considered fraud_ ).  
  
Queen Bitch is a pre-colonial term, the origin of which burned with several hundred books and a small group of people ( _people only her family spoke of in the dark_ ). No one uses it anymore, but the Carbonell lineage of Omegas is more than just Strong.  
  
Carbonells are always MORE.  
  
In Catalonia, people know that. They accept that, even if they don’t like it. Maria’s pack is bound to her loosely, moving around her like a royal court. She keeps them healthy and happy, visiting them and seeing to their needs, but never lets any of them get close. They give her praise, company, and social connections. They give her touch - puppy piles, braiding her hair ( _intricate traditional knots spilling over her shoulders_ ), washing her body in shared baths, dressing her in the mornings, anointing her with oils for their holidays ( _a bonfire Maria’s kind had to leap, oils catching fire on their skin for a brief second, illuminating them in a moment of rebirth_ )...  
  
It’s a good enough life. Her influence is strong - a whiff of her pheromones could make even a Beta tremble ( _feeling more than she feels, feeling things she’s pretending to-_ ).  
  
But Catalonia is absorbed by Spain, the world goes to war, and Maria longs for freedom. She doesn’t want to celebrate burning of people only her family remembers anymore ( _oil burning off her skin as she wants to scream)_ , doesn't want to be told she can’t celebrate either, doesn’t want to owe anyone anything. Maria doesn’t want to struggle under Spanish rule - she wants to be able to afford to keep her court instead of stretching her funds thin. She doesn’t want to answer to a foreign government, doesn’t want to bow her head like her aunt and her mother do.  
  
Diplomats come and tell her she can’t use her influence on anyone anymore. That her Omega nature is dishonest ( _they don’t say that, but they talk around it. She’s not an idiot - she knows how Europe raises their young. Always be honest - bullshit, why shouldn’t an Omega lie?_ ). That she can only manipulate for the good of the pack - she’s a queen, what’s good for her is good for them!  
  
Maria is young, only 23, and she’s arrogant. She’s never had reason not to be.  
  
She thinks the world will just give her freedom. She thinks there won't be a cost ( _creeping up over the years_ ).   
  
She goes to America, the land of dreams. She goes where her kind do not exist, abandoning the family that depended on her at home ( _Omegas were less attached to family than Alphas, so no one would look at her too closely for leaving. They wouldn’t know Queens were free, absolutely free, of the bonds of relation that held others back if they wanted to be_ ).  
  
Maria makes friends fast. Carbonell Omegas are always in demand - the strength of their lineage called to all assignments, pulled Strong Alphas in by the nose ( _Carbonells were beautiful, could make you feel like you were in heaven with a glance, and smelled like heaven too_ ). World War II drafted countless Omegas and Betas, got a large amount of them killed, leaving her as a rare good.  
  
Maria knew business, and she knew what she was worth.  
  
She does well as a socialite for years. But she isn’t rich, she isn’t free, she can’t support her people the way she wants to.  
  
Maria is hungry for more ( _Carbonells are always **more**_ ).  
  
So Maria goes hunting for a man when she’s 27. She goes to high society events dressed to kill, long neck exposed, wrists bare and gleaming with oil ( _her scent caught in it, surrounding her with a constant cloud of contentment despite what she actually felt_ ). And to her surprise, she finds a Beta. An inventor and a war profiteer, a scrappy man who had built an empire from nothing but his smarts and a reckless sense of adventure. One who had a scent sharper than metal, left the taste of salt in the back of her mouth.  
  
Howard Stark was charming despite being nearly twenty years her senior. He kisses her hand like a gentleman, winks like a rake, and his voice is the exact kind of whiskey-smooth that makes her shiver. Maria snapped him up in a second, letting her lust subtly curl up and around him _(slithering up his ankles like a snake, down into his lungs like poisonous gas. She touched her wrists to his, watched his gaze go dark and needy_ ), drawing on her memories of love to make him feel that, too.  
  
Howard fell head over heels in a night, moved her into his house in a month, married her in three.  
  
She made his bed smell like satisfaction every morning, made his suits carry an edge of adoration, his tie hold a whisper of pride. She made him HERS - staking a claim had never been easier ( _mated, bound tightly together as their scents blended_ ).  
  
They didn’t love each other ( _Maria didn’t know how and Howard loved ambition too much to love her_ ), but there were times when they came close. Howard knew how to say just the right thing, how to give her just enough freedom, how to hide the full force of her impact from curious eyes (Betas were crafty and Howard, Howard was the craftiest). Maria knew how to use her pheromones to draw him out of the depressive episodes he tended towards when he drank too much, knew how to mingle their scents until Howard felt like he was home, felt safe and happy.  
  
Together, they built an empire several times stronger than what Howard had slapped together during the war ( _a charmer could only gladhand so many rich folks without being beloved by high society_ ).  
  
Two years later and Maria is heavily pregnant, every employee in the mansion scrabbling to meet her every need. She’s generous and furious in turns ( _crying whenever she yells at the house staff, begging for forgiveness before getting angry again. Her emotions permeate the room and make nearly everyone lose control until Howard gives up on hiring anyone but Betas_ ). She’s sick all the time.  
  
The pregnancy is hard on her. Howard leaves her alone often ( _her nausea and misery strong enough to drive him away_ ) and Maria NEEDS the company. She misses home and she misses her people ( _HER people, the ones she bonded, the ones she could proudly call pack instead of the people she just donated money to here. Oh she had pack, of corse she did, but they weren’t the same! They were nowhere near as expansive as her sprawling pack at home, a whole town to visit and care for-_ ).  
  
She’s exhausted by the time she finally gives birth to Anthony ( _Antonio, her carinyo_ ) at the end of May. It takes awhile for her delight fills up the room, multi-layered and sparkling, after her son opens his eyes ( _bawling and screaming for all the world to hear, already knowing that soon no one would be listening_ ).  
  
He stops crying slowly as her pheromones saturates the air, the barest imitation of a smile crossing his lips ( _mimicking the small one on Maria’s own face. She’d seen people grin before, but she never saw a reason to_ ).  
  
She cradled him close and a tiny hand pats at her cheek, pulling it up and making her smile wider as her joy thickens, the scent calling out to everyone in the house, in the streets, in the city-  
  
Maria knows EXACTLY what her son is going to become.

_______

  
By the time Antonio is three ( _a quiet sensitive boy who was always tottering after the staff, eager to see what they were doing_ ) she’s even more sure. Every time a strong emotion spills out into a room, his beautiful brown eyes widen and he stumbles to the source curiously. He cries each and every time Maria does.  
  
Her Antonio is just like her. Carbonells are always more, though. Antonio inherits a lot of his clever father, too.  
  
He’s brilliant, constructing all kinds of interesting things. He does it for fun, at first. He’s just playing.  
  
But then he grows focused. One of his nursemaids, a lovely little Weak Omega who stares after Maria with awe, tells her he wants to build some friends. She says it like it’s sweet. But that...that bothers Maria.  
  
A Carbonell baby shouldn’t be this alone. Her kind were never meant to want for company. Were never meant to want for anything, but company in particular should never be in short supply ( _a pack that is never disturbed by much, a royal court with members that come and go, a steady stream of people to give love to_ ).  
  
Maria doesn’t like that Howard doesn’t want to bring people around the house, around his son. He should be showing Antonio off, should be rubbing their noses in the fact that her son could already detect their emotions with his eyes shut ( _and when most of his company was Omega - they didn’t emote much with their bodies, yet Antonio could read a person better than most Beta-raised children_ ).They’d fought about it shortly after her son’s birth, but somehow Maria had just...forgotten ( _busy with other affairs, with the sense of something missing that had gnawed at her since she came to America_ ).  
  
They fight about it again. Maria demands to know why her baby can’t leave the house if nobody can come in. Howard doesn’t want his heir ( _as if Antonio would EVER be a Stark in more than name_ ) to be influenced, doesn’t like how responsive he is already to the staff.  
  
Omegas this Strong are SUPPOSED to be social, Maria argues. They’re MEANT to be responsive, MEANT to be influenced - that’s how they could take care of their people!  
  
Their argument isn’t resolved that day. When they fight the next evening, it’s a little less ferociously. The next is even more half-hearted.  
  
Maria loves her son, but she was never cut out to be a mother. She was raised like a ruler - always maintaining her distance from everyone because herself and her pack come first ( _her son doesn’t even come second_ ).

________

  
At four Antonio ( _“Tony, mama! Nicknames come from friends, so if I have one I’ll make a friend, right?”_ ) makes a circuit board from his father’s scraps. It’s not that good ( _Maria can’t tell, but Tony pouts and stamps his foot, just barely avoiding tears. Jarvis, the family butler, tells Maria this means he’s upset with himself_ ), so he builds an engine a month later.  
  
After reviewing his son’s creations, Howard decides he’ll grow up to be a Beta (cool and unaffected - as if). His announcement fills Maria with a smug sense of superiority. She knows something the infamous Howard Stark doesn’t.  
  
But then she notices the slightest edge to his metal-sharp scent. Some top notes that soured the whole thing, made her heart twist in her chest as she peered at his face closer.  
  
There’s something a bit...off in the way Howard looks at Tony. Proud, but not like he’s proud of Tony. Like he’s proud of **himself**.  
  
Like Tony isn’t there at all.  
  
( _A ghost of a child, quietly falling the household staff around and trying to build his own friends_ )  
  
It’s disquieting, however Maria keeps her cool. She is nothing if not poised as she slowly fills the room with her own happiness, mingling it with Howard’s, keeping him smug and content. She serves him a bourbon, playing to the base notes of greed Howard’s happy scent rested on, turning it into gluttony.  
  
He has four glasses and falls asleep.  
  
Maria steals their son away to meet other children - something she should have done long ago.   
  
Tony is an absolute darling. He’s shy, an unexpected trait in a fledgling Carbonell Omega, though it doesn’t take long for him to bloom. Every kind touch makes Maria’s son unfurl a bit further, his bright smile following laughing children around the room like a flower to the sun.  
  
He falls head over heels into adoration ( _puppy love_ ) with Janet Van Dyne, obviously enough that even Maria can pick up on it ( _she wished for the umpteenth time that children didn't smell so...neutral_ ). Janet falls just as hard, their little hands linked as they nuzzle one another and draw robots and fairies and a dozen other things together.  
  
It’s precious. It makes Maria wonder why her parents never bonded with her, never felt the urge she was currently feeling to hold her child close ( _maybe they had? The Carbonells were traditional though not all Omegas worked the same way. They weren’t supposed to coddle their children, were supposed to drive them to make their own bonds_ ).  
  
Tony’s joyful squealing is the best thing Maria has ever heard. It makes her want to give the feeling to everyone else, an urge Howard usually diverted her from though Strong Omegas sometimes liked to share their feelings around ( _not as much as her kind, not as openly and strongly_ ). Howard isn’t there and her son is happy, so Maria gives in.  
  
Her pride and joy draws in dozens of other people, the Stronger children clinging to her skirts and basking in emotions they barely understand. More than a few Alphas look positively twitterpatted.  
  
Everyone seems to watch Tony, which is wonderful because Tony seems to love everyone who meets his eyes ( _everyone who has a kind word for him, anyone with a loving touch_ ). He’s falling all over himself.  
  
Maria’s boy is so soft, clenching a fistful of flowers from a dark-haired boy and a shiny pebble from the boy's sister sister like they were the world’s greatest treasures ( _not even noticing the way they squabbled over who he liked better_ ). This is exactly what he deserved ( _people adoring him and giving him gifts, touch, **pack** -_).  
  
She just KNOWS he’ll have his own little court someday.  
  
( _Maria doesn’t realize what she’s done. She doesn’t think about tomorrow, about Howard Stark, about an empty house and an empty life. She doesn’t think about Tony, not really, not ever_ )


	2. Your Enemy Whispers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everybody takes a step in the wrong direction. Except for Jarvis, of course.

When Maria brings Tony home the next morning, there’s already a newspaper pinned to their door. The cover photo is Tony, a shy smile lifting his pink cheeks, eyes averted as Janet Van Dyne nips his shoulder. There’s a flower tucked behind his ear, lopsided and smearing pollen in his hair. His fist is clenched around the pebble he’d been given. His left shoe is untied ( _another flower jammed between the laces_ ).

The headline speculates that Tony is a Carbonell Omega. The paper smells like whiskey.  
  
Maria isn't afraid to open the door, but she still hesitates ( _her fingers brushing over Tony's smiling face in the photo_ ). 

Howard’s fury is a strange thing. His scent was always sharp, almost astringent like gunpowder, but his anger was always flat. Maria often felt he was strangling it. She knew Howard didn't grow up with very supportive parents and that he often had to step on his own emotions to avoid a beating, however something about his anger always set her off. Made her want to pull it out of him by the root. Make it sharp like the rest of his feelings.

The whole mansion smelt flat and angry. Howard’s scent wasn’t strong, so he’d been angry for hours.

He was still angry.

Betas couldn’t add much subtlety to their scent. It was always just generic emotion, never really targeted. Even knowing this, Maria could almost swear she detected a curl of disgust towards their son in the sea of fury. No, not disgust.

Revulsion.

Maria drops Tony with Jarvis, still chattering away happily about his new friends, not noticing anything as Jarvis closes his eyes and focuses on calming memories. His pheromones are airy and light. They don’t cover Howard’s, but it’s enough to keep Tony unaware ( _she hopes so, at least_ ).

She finds Howard in their bedroom, whisky soaking into the sheets she had curled against just a day before. There’s no sign of her in this room now, her imprint replaced by shattered glass and alcohol.

There’s an abrupt stab of pain low in her gut as Howard considers rejecting the claim they share. He looks her dead in the eyes and considers it again, making her retch, before looking back at what he’s holding.

He's got her papers out. Her family papers, not her American ones, his bloodshot gaze fixed on the cobalt lettering ( _Reina, a Queen. Proof her American papers are falsified, though they wouldn't let her register as what she really is anyway_ ). 

The whole scene is threatening.   
  
It feels like he's threatening her.

Maria does the first thing that comes to mind. She does exactly what she’s always been taught to.

She takes hold of Howard’s fury and twists it with something similar.

( _She thinks of the new charity she’d taken on, care for the elderly, and how she’d felt when it was pitched to her. How much she believed in their cause, how much she wanted to help, how few people bothered-_ )

Passion tints his anger, making it lighter, bolder, better-

She twists again.

( _She thinks of coming to America by boat, of the rowdy Beta crew covered in gold jewelry flashing in the sun. She thinks of the first man she’d taken for a tumble, the way the rings on his-_ )

Excitement.

Then she nudges, both with words ( _“I just saw the most interesting vehicle on the way home, it’s got this tiny engine-“_ ) and her memories of creation until he’s focused on inventing.

He shoots her a narrow eyed look. He knows he’s being manipulated, had gotten good at detecting the signs over the years ( _and Maria had always been heavy handed)_ , but what will he do about it?

 **Nothing.** He couldn’t stop her.  
  
He was powerless - he was a Beta.  
  
Carbonells were often not taught the subtlety of emotion. They were taught which things were similar, which threads to pull, which angles to take when they wanted somebody to FEEL something. But they weren’t ever taught about the thoughts that could be attached to those feelings.  
  
The different directions they could take.  
  
Once, around the time the bonfire celebration Maria hated came to be, the old family had an especially gifted son. An emotional boy, heavy-handed as Maria with sharing his feelings, soaking his scent into the dirt roads of their town so thickly even the rain couldn’t wash it away.  
  
Once, the deep sadness he felt at the death of his best friend became engrained in his home. It dug deep into the grout, clung to the wall hangings, seeped into the stone. It infected the people who lived there.  
  
Once, those who were already mourning continued to do so. Once, those who did not mourn found something else to be saddened by.  
  
Themselves. They found a sense of self-loathing, small and barely present, and gave it new life with the gifted son’s sadness.  
  
Once, those people toppled from the rooftops and an idea spread. A seed upon which sadness could grow like a poison. Rain couldn’t wash the gifted son’s scent from the dirt, but fire purges everything.  
  
Even the texts the Carbonell family kept, forgotten and dusty in a bone-dry storeroom.  
  
Maria doesn’t know this story. All she knows is that she is powerful, fed up with hiding her son’s nature ( ** _her own nature_** ), and that dealing with her problems head-on has never been her strong suit. All she knows is Tony was happy and deserves to stay that way. All she knows is Catalonia; America nothing more than a dream to her.  
  
Maria can’t see that she’s making things worse, focused on Howard as she is. She’s taken seeds that would’ve taken years to grow and breathed new vigor into them, making Howard’s insecurities and anger stronger.  
  
_Tony learned to engineer far earlier than Howard, though he hadn’t done much yet._  
  
_Upstaged by a child._  
  
_Tony always looked to Howard for approval, but Tony had no one else._  
  
_He could be stolen away by something as simple as a flower._  
  
_And Howard’s own wife, his mate, would allow it._  
  
A fixation is growing. Perhaps it would be fine with constant redirection under Maria’s watchful eye.  
  
But...  
  
Maria isn’t always home. She’s home less and less as Tony grows - his intelligence, his empathy, his obvious development made her think he didn’t need much guidance.  
  
And Tony, her carinyo...he loves his father. Admires his work, craves his attention, begs for his praise.  
  
Keeps his secrets.  
  
( _Tony, age 5, stumbles up the stairs of the mansion, slowed by scrap metal and his own childish strength. It takes him hours to make his way to the top - he drops parts constantly, always goes back to pick up every dropped bolt or wire. He cries, silent and alone for a few minutes when he finally makes it. No one notices_ )  
  
Maria doesn’t realize Howard has been making Tony WORK for love until he’s seven and **changed**. Her child is very good at hiding things. At least, that's what she tells herself.  
  
( _Tony spends part of his birthday carefully bending filaments into shape inside a series of glass tubes. Howard comes to pick them up at midnight without a word - he simply wipes a bit of blood from the glass_ )  
  
The only reason she notices are the words,  
  
“Do I deserve it?”  
  
After Maria tells Tony she loves him. There’s a cadence to them that Maria noticed because Tony usually speaks like her, the slightest Spanish lilt curling around his tongue.  
  
“Do I deserve it?”  
  
Is spoken like a true New Yorker.  
  
“Do.”  
  
Pitches upwards and the rest of the sentence toppled down, taking Maria’s heart with it.  
  
“Do I deserve it?”  
  
Does Tony DESERVE love? He’s built to be loved, she’s built to be loved, even the idea that they aren’t is-  
  
It’s-  
  
( _Tony’s big brown eyes don’t look hurt. Don’t look sad. They’re simply curious. Her sensitive son doesn’t even flinch at the idea no one will love him unless he earns it_ )  
  
( _Tony sits in Howard’s study, small fingers idly tracing the grain in the wood. Howard spills a drink on his desk and stares at him, waiting for Tony to clean it up. He does, nervous and hopeful, and when he does a good job Howard says, “I love you.”_ )  
  
( _Howard grimaces at his reflection, scrubs angrily at the tears gathering in corners of his eyes. “Don’t be a pussy, boy.” He tells himself, “Man up. It’ll be worth it in the end - Tony needs to learn not to cry.”_ )  
  
The fight that follows Maria’s realization is terrifying. It begins when she gently sets Tony down in the kitchen, kisses his forehead, and shuts the door behind her. Her rage sweeps around her like an oil fire, burning and bringing an Omega maid to her knees ( _gasping like she was choking on it_ ).  
  
Maria slams her fist through the drywall in Howard’s office seconds after ripping the door open. It smashes against the opposite wall and the noise it makes is all the warning anyone gets.  
  
She doesn’t even scream at Howard in English.  
  
The fight never seems to stop. Nobody knows when Maria or Howard SLEEP. Their argument spans two months where the staff can’t handle the emotional turmoil, beginning to fight amongst themselves. Plates are shattered in the kitchen and there are red smears on the tile. Many staff members forget to go home, too busy circling the cook in the kitchen ( _armed with a cast iron pan_ ).  
  
Howard goes to business meetings covered in bloody scratches and fresh from the shower after the first month. People can still smell Maria’s hatred, can see how white Howard’s face goes when Maria rejects their claim, digs into it on purpose ( _wrenches at the roots just because she ca_ n).  
  
Maria goes to a charity ball in scarlet. People offer to fight for her - whatever war she’s involved herself in, they’ll fight it. There’s a riot that night without a cause, quietly swept away by the police.  
  
The fight goes and goes and-  
  
It only ends when Tony disappears.  
  
( _There’s a closet in the mansion piled high with books and a flashlight. One can only guess what it was used for. One can only run their fingers through the nest of dresses, Maria’s finest, and scrap metal and imagine what kind of person must have curled up here for hours at a time. One can only look at the crude drawing on the door of a family of three and wonder)_  
  
( _Years later, Tony doesn’t touch the closet. Neither does anyone else_ )  
  
He’d been making his own dinner in the kitchen, the staff mostly gone and Tony’s presence mostly forgotten, last anyone saw. No one notices for four days. The one who does notice is a slight young Alpha boy who washes the windows ( _no one knows that he gives Tony watercolours, let’s him draw on the windows before he washes it all away. Tony picked him flowers every week, so he noticed when there were none of the sill_ ).  
  
It takes a long time to find Tony, many more hours than it should have. It should have taken seconds, because he was hidden away with the butler.  
  
Jarvis had a cottage on the edge of their property. Tony had run there, sneaking the lock open and tucking himself away under the bed. Jarvis has found him the moment he came home - the quiet sniffling was a dead giveaway.  
  
“Madre pulls on something inside.”  
  
Tony whispers from beneath the bed as Jarvis painstakingly avoids looking at him ( _avoids moving too quickly, avoids making loud noises_ ),  
  
“She yanks on it and Howard gets sick. Then he yanks back and she...”  
  
Tony coughs wetly, sicker than a dog after taking care of himself for God knows how long,  
  
“There’s something wrong with the thing between them. It’s all shredded. Like the dishrag Jessica uses even though Teddy says it’s bad. Full of holes.”  
  
Jarvis leans his forehead against the cupboard and slowly counts backwards from 60 in his head. How dare they expose a child to their toxic bond. How dare they swamp such a responsive boy with hatred-  
  
“The whole house is angry.”  
  
Tony confided in him, his voice shaky,  
  
“I did something wrong and now everyone's angry.”  
  
Jarvis...Jarvis can’t do this. Can’t pretend there’s nothing wrong just to keep Tony calm. Can’t go back to work tomorrow.  
  
He turns on his heel and marches over to the bed, kneeling down and lifting the bedskirt.  
  
Tony’s gaze is far too tired and worn for a child.  
  
“Tony,”  
  
He choked out, holding on to his British stiff upper lip with everything he has,  
  
“I would very much like to give you a hug. Will you let me hug you?”  
  
Tears well up in Tony’s eyes. He shakes his head, lank brown curls flopping.  
  
“I don’t deserve it.”  
  
He tells Jarvis,  
  
“You can’t hug me because I don’t deserve it.”  
  
Jarvis is a Beta, already bound to Howard and Maria and two brilliant women who visited him often from across the pond. He had pack and wasn’t particularly inclined to emotional outbursts.  
  
Tony shouldn’t have been able to feel him at all. Shouldn’t have been able to affect him so deeply. He was barely 8.  
  
But Jarvis felt a tug inside himself and he tugged right back. Just like that, Tony crawled out from underneath the bed and tentatively opened his arms ( _his face a picture of anxiety_ ).  
  
Jarvis held onto him for an hour, petting his head until Tony only smelled like him.  
  
In the days Tony spent there, he discovered that love wasn’t only something that floated on the air around him. It wasn’t only the bright sparkling thing his madre pressed against his favourite clothes and his neck.  
  
Love was something Tony could touch, even if he didn’t deserve it. Jarvis would tug and it was like...Tony knew he wanted Tony to go to him. It made Jarvis happy when Tony did. When Tony pressed his nose against Jarvis’ wrist or tickled his sides or stole his cuff links-  
  
Madre’s love was diffuse. Tony asked for it and it would appear, but it would fizzle away. Sometimes other people would pick it up even though it was supposed to be Tony’s.  
  
But nobody could take away Jarvis’ hands. They didn’t disappear either. They stayed with him.  
  
Tony grabs one of them as Jarvis kneads some dough. The old man smiles indulgently, letting Tony toy with his fingers whenever he wanted to.  
  
Jarvis was somebody Tony could reach.  
  
Deep inside, that thought settles in Tony’s chest. It’s warm, like Jarvis is. It feels **right.**  
  
With a click ( _or at least, Tony imagined there’s a click. His dog bot clicked when he turned him on for the very first time_ ), they connect.  
  
Jarvis draws a startled breath.  
  
“Oh my.”  
  
He mutters, his hand instinctively clutching Tony’s tighter,  
  
“I suppose you've just made your first pack member, Young Sir.”  
  
( _Tony's mother comes for him later that night. Jarvis doesn’t give him up, though. Because it’s really difficult to bond a Beta with a pack, difficult to bond anyone as a child - from the moment of presentation, by God. Jarvis won’t leave this kid alone in that house ever again, not while knowing what he is_ )  
  
( _Unfortunately, he won’t be able to stop what’s coming_ )


	3. I Know About Whispers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone is given a choice that isn't really a choice. Tony is given one he can't resist, Peggy is given one that will both redeem and damn her, Jarvis makes one too late, and Maria isn't given much of one at all.

When Maria recognizes Jarvis’ protective hovering for what it is, she’s overjoyed. Her carinyo is an Omega - an incredibly powerful one. He’s a Carbonell. She was RIGHT.  
  
There’s a minute of smug satisfaction that fills her to the very brim and makes Jarvis’ brows lift. But then...  
  
Well.  
  
Maria’s a Queen. Always has been, always knew she would be. She knows what she is, even if she’s had to twist it, warp it into something else to fit America, to bring her old money somewhere new, to start again ( _keep her court in things like charities instead of more personal attention, tone down her signals, keep the manipulation under wraps_ ).  
  
Maria had been brought up somewhere familiar with her kind, even if it didn’t quite approve. But here? America knew nothing of Queens. Treated them like they didn’t exist.  
  
Would Tony know what he was the way she did? Would he be allowed to? Or would he be smothered at the first whisper of being something more?  
  
Tony would be a Queen, but...  
  
What should she raise him to be? What kind of Omega?  
  
She lays awake that night and wonders what she’s supposed to do. Tony will have to be taken for assignment eventually. He’s presented incredibly early, so she has time if she needs it, if she chooses to use it...  
  
( _Tony is homeschooled, so only the staff will know. She’d wanted to send him to private school soon, though. He would’ve been able to meet other children there. He would've been able to make connections, make friends, bond_ )  
  
Howard hasn’t noticed a thing. He hasn’t been given the chance to. Maria doesn’t know how long she can hide her son, though, let alone the new way the Butler hovered over him. What would she do if Howard manhandled Tony and Jarvis snapped at him? What if they had to fire him? Tony would be devastated...  
  
Her husband had hidden her. Maybe he would be willing to hide his son, too? Surely, though he’d hoped for Tony to be something else before, he would change now that Tony’s assignment was definite. He’d see that an Omega could be just as capable of a businessman, just as capable of an inventor...  
  
She tells him. She makes sure she tells him when he’s in a good mood and Tony is out of the house with Jarvis. Maria makes up with him over breakfast, kisses him on the cheek, and tells him his son is an Omega.  
  
And Howard’s scent goes unsettlingly blank. His face is doing something complicated she can’t understand ( _his mouth slants like it’s pressed carefully around the blade of a knife)_.  
  
He leaves for work without telling her a thing. The anxiety she feels has the house staff fluttering nervously, still shaken by her and Howard’s months long battle of wills. They hover over her and try their best to alleviate the heavy atmosphere.  
  
When Howard comes home, all he talks about is the business. Stark Industries is the future ( _though Maria knew he meant HIS future_ ). He doesn’t want that future in the hands of a soft-hearted boy who is going to bond everyone and everything.  
  
Howard doesn’t understand that Queens are exactly what they sound like. He doesn’t see, even though Maria is RIGHT THERE, that their bonds are loose and THEY are the leaders. People aim to serve THEM.  
  
Tony would share the wealth, but no more than she would if he was raised right. The business would flourish, even though Americans frown on Omegas keeping secrets and telling lies - Tony could easily bond some members of the DoD...  
  
Nothing she says sways Howard, though. In fact, he begins to take on a patronizing look that nearly has her reaching for frustration to crush him with.  
  
Howard says he wants someone in control of themselves. Someone who could lie and negotiate and INVENT ( _completely ignoring the fact that Maria just said that Tony could do that. That Maria did that. That Queens skirted the law all the time in America if they wanted to live_ ).  
  
Then he says he wants Tony to have independence. That he wants Tony to be able to work because Tony loves inventing. That he wants Tony to meet the stipulations he’d just laid out - stipulations he thought an Omega couldn’t meet.  
  
And Maria stops arguing, tilting her head in confusion and suspicion.  
  
Maria can manipulate easily with emotion, but she’s lazy about mental manipulation. She never bothered to learn it well. And Howard, well, he’s a Beta. He’s had to learn how to work around scent, even if Maria’s could hit him like a punch in the gut.  
  
He knows how to sweet talk her. She married him over it.  
  
“Tony loves to invent, Maria. It’s his purpose - he’s been doing it since he was just three years old.”  
  
“He’ll need the best teachers to really let his true potential shine - we can’t always hire tutors. He’ll also need a lot of support to work in the company, to create his own connections, make his own divisions. He’s going to have to socialize.”  
  
“He has so much potential, Maria. He’s precious.”  
  
“And he’ll be ostracized if people figure out what he is.”  
  
A stab of fear lances through her so sharply she doesn’t realize Howard doesn’t smell anxious. She doesn’t realize there’s a proud tilt to his chin.  
  
“He won’t be able to hide it darling, not this young, not like you. He’s already bonded with Jarvis, you said. People will figure it out if he keeps doing things like that.”  
  
“Tony can’t just pretend to be a normal Omega, Maria. It’s too close to the truth. The things that don’t line up will be too tempting and people will look too closely - his bonds will make it obvious, for Christssake.”  
  
“Peggy had to pretend to be a Beta during the war in order to spy. She did it for years and it worked out fine.”  
  
“Why can’t Tony do the same thing, darling?”  
  
As distant as Maria can be, as much as she doesn’t really understand about her son, she cares. She cares deeply about him and his well-being. She also cares about her own - she cares about her family, her social standing, her company, and cares most about how they all relate to the pack she’s cobbled together in America.  
  
So she can see Howard’s point, just a bit.  
  
But she also cares about her heritage and about the impact hiding has had on her. She knows how much it will hurt Tony.  
  
Maria’s internal conflict makes her an easy target. She cares and so she frowns, she argues, she gears up to fight...and that’s when Howard gets his chance. He lets Maria rant about independence and freedom, the things she values most. He lets her gain steam, gain confidence in her argument, and then he says;  
  
“Let the boy CHOOSE, Maria.”  
  
It’s something she can’t say no to. Maria doesn’t know that Tony’s choices have been coerced for a long time now ( _with harsh words, soft “I love you”s, stories of Captain America and the Howling Commandos intermingled with the implication that Tony needs to be worth more than them if he wants Howard’s attention_ ).  
  
It takes a tense week for Peggy to arrive from Cambridge. It’s difficult for her to leave right in the middle of the semester, both of her key courses having no other professors to teach them. She makes an exception for Howard, though. Always has for her people.  
  
She rushes to get there even faster when Howard mentions that his son is from a Strong lineage and is struggling with control.  
  
The whole family gathers at in the foyer when Peggy calls, telling them she’ll be there in an hour. Tony scuttles around behind Jarvis and barely looks at Maria or Howard, only doing so when Howard is seconds from forcing him to. Maria chalks it up to her son’s responsiveness instead of the trained action it is ( _Jarvis snaps the stem of a wine glass and buys Tony a mechanic’s textbook that costs his whole months paycheque. He wants Tony to have something, just one thing, to enjoy. Tony stubbornly returns it, and Jarvis wants to scream_ ).  
  
Tony twitches when there’s a knock on the door. He looks like he wants to run away, though the nervousness in his scent has the same flat quality as Howard’s anger ( _strangled and suppressed_ ).

_______

  
There’s something about Peggy Carter that shouts,  
  
_“Pay attention.”_  
  
In an internationally understood language. Perhaps it’s her stride: even, measured, powerful. Maybe it’s the exact curl of her snow white hair, better suited to a painting than a person. It could be the perfectly straight set of her shoulders or the black eyepatch over her left eye.  
  
Tony, looking back, thinks it’s because his Aunt Peggy was 10 feet of whoop-ass in a 5 foot can. All the excess whoop-ass surrounded her in a miasma that was easily sensed.  
  
Either way, Tony had been unabashedly fascinated from the moment she stepped in through the door. She’d been dressed all in scarlet. She’d looked like everything he wanted to be: confident, colorful, and powerful.  
  
He remembered that first moment vividly - his memory was near-perfect anyway, but Aunt Peggy’s entrance was bright and alive even years later.  
  
She’d ignored absolutely everyone to kneel down to Tony’s height, sharp brown eyes meeting his from between Jarvis’ legs. Right away, she’d smiled. Whispered,  
  
“Hello, Ducky.”  
  
In her British accent ( _reminding Tony of Jarvis and safety and **pack**_ ), and then hugged his only pack member (k _issing his cheek and squeezing his butt playfully, laughing at Jarvis’ affronted squawk of, “There is a CHILD, Carter!”_ ). She hadn’t tried to touch Tony, hadn’t born down on him with her scent or sniffed at him like his madre did.  
  
It had established a pattern for who Tony would trust in his later life - anyone who looked at him and his pack first when there were threats in the room, anyone who acknowledged them as IMPORTANT but didn’t try to touch, was good in his books. It was stupid, but he’d been so starved for attention back then that that little moment dug itself right into his brain and never came loose. Got him into all kinds of trouble later.  
  
Tony didn’t warm up to her right away, of course. He trusted that Jarvis liked her, but he could sense the expectation rolling off of Howard. He was terrified of making a wrong move.  
  
He was even more afraid when he realized Peggy was Peggy Carter of the Howling Commandos and the first Director of SHIELD.  
  
( _On the rare occasions Tony had done something especially good, Howard would sit Tony on his knee in his study. He’d pour a tumbler of scotch and tell Tony stories about the war. He’d make shadow puppets by the fireplace, gesture wildly, do impressions_ )

  
( _It always ended with disappointment, though. Captain America was dead, so was his Second, and the fairytale didn’t have a happy ending. Tony wasn’t enough to fill the hole in his father’s life, so he’d have to try harder, be better, be more-_ )  
  
Meeting a Howling Commando meant Tony could **lose** a Howling Commando. He could embarrass himself in front of a war hero, or upset her, or make her hate him. He could befriend her and have her taken away, just like Jan ( _who had snuck him letters until she didn’t anymore, her last one written in a different hand_ ).  
  
Aunt Peggy wins him over in a week. Even though Tony realizes it was planned years later, he can’t bring himself to ever regret it. Even knowing what it would eventually lead to.

_______

  
When Howard calls, Peggy always answers. She hadn’t heard from him in over a year by the time her secretary pops in on her criminal psychology class to pass her a note.  
  
It’s strange to hear Howard talk about his son. More time had passed than Peggy thought - Anthony was already 8. Peggy had missed a lot of her godson’s life.  
  
Howard tells her, sheepish as can be, about the fight him and his wife had gotten into. He sounds awkward and rough, just like he always does when he’s about to cry, when he admits his son went missing for a time during it.  
  
There’s something off with the way he tells Peggy his son had presented, but she’s too distracted with the idea of a Carbonell Omega child ( _memories of Bucky Barnes, too Strong for his own good, Strong enough to get himself killed-_ ) to notice.  
  
Howard admits he doesn’t know how to teach his son control. He admits that he and Maria don’t have much to do with him at all, because Howard has been slipping too deep into work ( _and the bottle_ ) and Maria was never particularly maternal.  
  
The honesty catches Peggy off-guard. The last time they’d spoken, Peggy had fought with Howard over the shift in his values as of late. She’d been angry about how often he tried to wheedle her into getting her connections to help him make morally dubious money. She’d suspected it was because of the way depression had been eating at him for years, worsened by alcohol and age, but to have him essentially admit to it-  
  
They cry over the phone and talk of old times. Good times. She feels like she has her old friend back ( _there’s something off though. She hasn’t seen Howard in years, so maybe he’s changed a little. But the way he says her name...there’s a wheedle there_ ).  
  
She agrees to come to the States to meet his kid and teach him self-control ( _Steve Rogers staring over the edge of a snowy cliff and Peggy yanking him back, nails biting into his skin as she saw the terrible blankness of his expression. “I lost him.” With red red teeth and bleeding cheeks. “I lost everything.” With a smile that scared her-_ ).  
  
Being a member of a Strong lineage was difficult. Peggy would make sure Anthony would be able to decide when and if he wanted to act on instinct.  
  
There’s something off when she arrives at Stark Mansion. The upkeep has worsened - she wonders if Jarvis is sick or on vacation. He would usually never stand for such unevenly cut grass or dry flowers.  
  
Peggy gets her answer when the door opens and she sees Jarvis standing in front of a child (small and skinny and all too much like Steve) that peers between his legs curiously ( _and anxiously, though he’s pretending not to be_ ). Now she knows how Howard knew Anthony’s lineage strength.  
  
Her gaze flicks up to meet Jarvis’. He looks incredibly sad, his hands clenched around the thighs of his trousers and stiff upper lip not quite in place. The child follows her gaze, then awkwardly placed his hand over one of Jarvis’ clenched fists, scowling at her. Peggy makes an evaluation of Anthony Stark that will stick with her for the rest of her life:  
  
_“Too much heart too soon.”_  
  
( _“Just like Steve.” Whispers the traitorous part of heart that refused to let the war go. She’d given up the military, given up SHIELD, and it still wouldn’t leave her alone_ )  
  
The next motion she makes feels like slipping into an old well-loved leather jacket ( _too big in the shoulders because Bucky was broad before Hydra starved him-)_. She kneels down to Tony’s height and gives him the exact same acknowledgement she’d given Steve, then treats Jarvis like she’d treated Bucky all those years ago ( _when they’d pulled him from that awful metal table and Steve had snarled at everyone_ ). She greets a Prime and she greets a Second of a small strongly knit pack.  
  
Jarvis clearly approves, as does Maria.  
  
Tony keeps watching her suspiciously ( _once bitten, twice shy. Oh Howard, what have you done?_ ).  
  
Soon, Howard drags his wife away for a reunion lunch. It’s suspicious and an alarm rings in Peggy’s skull, distant and tinny ( _“He wants something.” It says. It’s right_ ).  
  
It’s already too late, though. She was never going to be able to deny Tony love.  
  
( _If she saw Steve in Tony, what did Howard see with those bloodshot eyes?_ )  
  
She lavishes him with attention and affection, just like Howard wanted. It irks her because she can’t figure out what he’s trying to do and she can’t just ignore this too-much child that has won over one of her best friends. She can’t turn away from someone who has already resigned themselves to her leaving.  
  
Stubbornly, she refused to start teaching him anything about suppressing his Omega instincts. Tony is already very restrained, his responses placating in nature, and she doesn’t want to worsen that behaviour ( _the way he shrunk back into himself despite the way his eyes flashed_ ). Instead she tells Tony stories she suspected his father never did.  
  
Howard told him all of the Howlies successes and accolades. Peggy tells him about their failures, some of her guilt easing as her mistakes make him smile tentatively or frown in concentration ( _some of the expressions that pass over Tony’s face are better suited to a 40 year old. Most of his questions are, too_ ).  
  
There are tall tales about Peggy’s grand plans and Bucky Barnes’ bumbling attempts at executing them ( _Hydra had a castle once. A whole castle! It had a moat and everything. It wasn’t Peggy’s fault Bucky had fallen in when they were attempting to enter an underground passageway, and it certainly wasn’t her fault that he got tangled in his own rifle strap and nearly drowned_ ). There are more truthful ones about her petty squabbles with Dugan and Morita, the time she put lipstick on Bucky’s guns because he kept giving them names of ‘beautiful dames’, the day her and Steve kissed for the first time ( _missing terribly and clacking their teeth together_ ).  
  
She tells Tony all about how the Howlies were Home even though she hadn’t bonded with them, unwilling to potentially compromise her position as a spy. She held them at a distance but loved them anyway.  
  
That gets Tony’s attention. It makes Peggy realize that she hadn’t had all of it before - Tony’s presence next to her is suddenly overwhelming ( _interest practically swamping her as it poured off of him, the weight of his gaze prickling her skin)._ It’s that story that finally gets Tony to trust her _(to stop acting like a tiny adult_ ).  
  
How lonely ( _not that Peggy had any right to talk_ ). He expected to never bond again.

  
She breaks the tension with a story of how Bucky once tried to claim her ( _he’d puked three times and she hadn’t felt the slightest bit bad. She was never going to be anyone’s Second_ ). As Tony laughs, she presses a palm against her too quick pulse and worries (s _he thinks she knows what Howard wanted now_ ).

  
By the end of the week, there’s a whisper of a bond between herself and Tony. She knows it’s going to get stronger with time ( _can already feel an edge of the NEED to make sure Tony is alright, the first signs of fixation, can almost locate his scent in a room full of people despite her weak senses_ ).  
  
Howard does, too. And somehow, that’s threatening.

_______

Tony gets sent away to boarding school. It doesn’t go well.  
  
His teachers tell him he needs to sit down, shut up, and work at their pace. He does, but he doesn’t like it. He especially hates it in math ( _silently seething_ ).  
  
He acts exactly like he had with Peggy at first - he placates, but beneath the surface a spark of defiance and resentment grows. Tony loves his freedom just as much as Maria does. Boarding school is a chance at freedom that he can't pass up.  
  
Tony gets angry. He chokes it until he can’t.  
  
Then, inexplicably, the mathematics professor canes Tony’s hands so severely he bleeds. The students turn on him and cane him right back.  
  
He’s fired and several students are expelled.

_______

  
Students keep bringing Tony Stark stray animals. Nothing anyone says or does can make them stop. It’s causing problems in the dorms and even Tony seems overwhelmed.  
  
Eventually, he gets detention for it. Then his meals are restricted. Students sneak him food and preen about it within adult earshot, so Tony is isolated.  
  
The stray animal problem stops. Many of the students are antsy and disgruntled, but as long as Tony is kept alone at night, there’s no further issue.

_______

  
There’s a sudden illness spreading amongst the students, a depression that lingers and exhausts them. It starts with a pair of boys in the upper years and a robot dog smashed to pieces, no larger than an apple.  
  
Tony gets sent home. Officially, it’s sick leave. Unofficially, it’s because he’s the cause.  
  
He doesn’t look sorry about it at all ( _his shoulders set Peggy Carter straights his lips tucked sweetly over sharp teeth_ ).

_______

  
The letters and calls about Tony’s ‘incidents’ pile up until Peggy returns to New York. Howard begs her to keep his son safe, despite the fact Howard NEVER begs, and she cracks. She teaches Tony the barest measures of self-control and tries to sort out the twisting in her gut.  
  
Tony’s episodes are normal for a lineage as Strong as his, but...  
  
He’s smart. Smart enough that there was no definitive evidence of what he was despite the school’s suspicions or his classmates interest ( _though there are official documents now stating he had Omega tendencies, but they thought he hadn’t quite presented yet. Tony was always moving, always gesticulating, alternating between a thousands actions and feelings that blurred his scent trail to anyone who tried to trace it later. He didn’t bond. He hides amongst the other Omegas and doesn’t let his teachers smell him up close_ ).  
  
He’s emotional. He’s REALLY emotional ( _he cries at all of Peggy’s sad stories, though he always tries to conceal it. His letters to her from school had been unbearably depressing_ ).  
  
The consequences of his outbursts are...big.  
  
Tony’s getting better at acting like a Strong Omega instead of something bigger, but for some reason Maria keeps getting nervous. She hangs around during Peggy’s instruction and shows Tony how to use his gifts in subtle ways. Her emotions keep Peggy’s feeling like they’ve been jammed in a blender - it’s suffocating ( _she can’t imagine how it makes Tony feel_ ).  
  
And then Tony slips up. Jarvis has a nasty fall down the stairs and Tony’s sheer alarm keeps anyone from approaching and assisting for over an hour. Everyone fussed over him instead as their natural instinct took over ( _Omegas in distress needed to calmed if anyone wanted to stop the distress from filling them, too_ ).  
  
Maria is hysterical when she hears about it - she forces the paramedics to sign NDAs and threatens half the staff. Then, at the highest point of her emotional spiral, she begs Peggy to do more.  
  
Her emotions strangle Peggy’s so thoroughly she can’t even remember the next several hours. What she can remember is teaching Tony something other than diverting his strongest emotions into weaker ones.  
  
She teaches him to crush them completely flat. Strangle them away into nothingness or just a whisper.  
  
He's a quick study ( _something that will come to haunt her_ ).  
  
In Peggy’s head, this is a reasonable response. Tony wants to defend his pack and this will let him. The logic is foreign to her, but takes weeks to pull out by the roots ( _weeks spent holding her nose against Jarvis’ neck and trying not to go to Maria, trying not to make Maria feel better, to feel what she feels_ ).  
  
She goes back to the UK to clear her head. There’s something OFF. There’s something wrong. She knows there is - Peggy Carter has never been anything less than a deductive genius and she trusts her intuition.  
  
Tony calls her, though. He’s sad and lonely and their bond pulls at Peggy’s heart despite the way she had resisted it. He’s so - he’s so loyal to her. Even though she doesn’t deserve it.  
  
She goes back.  
  
Maria has become more afraid in her absence. She’s avoiding her son, afraid of damaging him further ( _as if his normal expressions of Omega manipulation were damage - what was going on here?_ ). Peggy tries to talk her down and gets whammied again by her concern.  
  
There’s a scent that’s unnatural swimming in Maria’s. It’s an opiate.  
  
When Peggy goes for a breather in the garden, Howard wheedles her. Jarvis stays away from the whole thing, struggling against the tide of emotion even as a Beta ( _clasping her shoulder in solidarity and pity for her as a Weak Omega. Maria was doing a number on her_ ). Tony hides out at his cottage whenever he can, growing quieter and more reclusive, developing a sharp tongue to match their dry British wit ( _developing the flicker of defiance he’d been concealing into a flame_ ).  
  
Howard’s wheedling worsens and Jarvis grows concerned. He’s concerned and Maria is concerned and Peggy’s Omega empathy is KILLING her. Tony is...Tony is...  
  
( _All too much like Steve, likely to die when he lost the people he called important. Forming bonds like that would kill him - it seemed to kill all the Strong lineages she’d known_ )  
  
( _Bucky Barnes having a Redline incident, throwing away his gun and his life_ )  
  
( _Falling, over and over and over_ )  
  
( _A well-loved jacket fitted over Peggy’s shoulders. “Thanks, Ducky.” And a joking kiss on a stubbled cheek just to see Steve glower at his best friend_ )  
  
Peggy had to wonder: how would Tony have his own life as a Strong Omega and head of the company? People would always be after him, trying to abuse his bonds. He’d been suspicious of her at first but still trusted so easily - her Ducky had a soft heart. People would use him.  
  
His pack size will be unsustainable with running a company. He won’t be able to work without whammying people like Maria had been doing to Peggy. That’s no way to live, no way to run a pack...  
  
She wonders and wonders and gets eaten alive by the Stark family circus ( _something that never would’ve happened when she was in her prime, before the war when her convictions laid on solid ground and she couldn’t be swayed. Going back to being an Omega had ruined her, but playing Beta had ruined the Howlies_ ).  
  
( _Nothing Peggy ever does saves the people she loves forever. A rescue has always led to more pain in the future, but she can’t ever resist trying-_ )  
  
( _Bucky Barnes falls and she knows that she won’t be able to stop Steve from doing the same-_ )  
  
Eventually, it stops occurring to Peggy that Tony doesn’t have to be a CEO ( _he’d written a two page story with Jarvis, a grin on his face, where he fought with the Howlies. It was framed on Peggy’s desk_ ). She asks him all kinds of questions about his future as one, completely missing the determination growing inside of him as she drowned in fear of the distant past.  
  
By the time it does occur to her again, Tony is dead set on becoming a Beta. 

Tony wants to make his mother happy, wants his dad to look at him again, wants to be like Jarvis and her. He’s absorbed all of their feelings and made them his own.  
  
Young as he was, Tony was stubborn. Nothing would change his mind now.  
  
He reasons with Peggy when she starts trying to play Devil’s Advocate ( _something is OFF - there’s a part of Peggy made of steel, platinum, diamond-hard that Bucky Barnes’ had praised her for, had given her an old knife he’d been presented years before he met her, and that part is immutable. It’s screaming. It’s screaming at her and she knows that it’s right_ ).  
  
Tony has never been allowed to have a big pack before, so why start now? He already has Jarvis and Peggy. Maybe he’d bond his parents one day. Why change that?  
  
He won’t admit he’s lonely - Tony was clever and his pain had been punished before. He wasn’t going to admit to it now, not to her ( _maybe to Jarvis, but not to her. She’d left before. Let him down. She knew she had_ ).

( _There's a flicker of paper stuffed into a crack in the sidewalk. A thousand ribbons of paper in a ruined city. **Warsaw**. All of them say something - something that made Peggy throw away Bucky's knife. Something that made the screaming inside of her seem so distant)  
  
(Still, she listened. She had to listen-_ )  
  
She talks in circles around him, trips him up, makes him give away in bits and pieces that he wants more people in his life. But he quickly tells her that he can build more pack if he needs to - he's made robots before.  
  
She grimaces and Tony looks abruptly like the vulnerable child he is. He turns his face away from her, admitting,  
  
“Jarvis didn’t like when I said that either.”  
  
He picks at his nails,  
  
“What’s wrong with making my own friends?"  
  
Peggy doesn’t know how to tell Tony he shouldn’t have to when she knows he doesn’t have many other options ( _her brain still stopping and stalling on Tony Stark, CEO of Stark Industries)_.  
  
“I already have to hide, Aunt Pegs.”  
  
He shrugs at her, nearly 10 and already sly ( _thinking he’s getting the best deal he can without realizing its price, turning Peggy into his own personal Faust_ ),  
  
“Either I can pretend to be a normal Omega or I can pretend to be a Beta. What’s the difference?”  
  
He’s right and Peggy is compromised. Jarvis trusts her. He’s compromised, too ( _already beginning to retreat to his cottage. Giving Tony a place where his parents have no hold. Over-valuing Tony's continued happiness there instead of overall, the tight bond between them and Tony's misery twisting his logic_ ).  
  
There’s nobody left in Stark mansion to say this might be a bad idea.

_______

  
Tony Stark is home-schooled until he’s 13. He learned mathematics, physics, foreign languages, history, and literature. It’s a curriculum on-level with the top private schools, except for the absence of Assignment classes teaching him to socialize and bond.  
  
In their place, Tony’s mother teaches him how to wield his influence, drawing it out of himself like wire from a spool. He pictures it in his mind’s eye:  
  
Ductile and flexible as gold. Threading into a much larger machine shaped by his hands and his heart.  
  
Maria shows him how to manipulate small things, how to grab hold and twist, and how to conceal it from even someone like Peggy Carter ( _trained to resist Omega impulses, to read body language like a Beta, to give off her own false signals_ ). She doesn’t make Tony practice on Peggy because it upsets him, but she still asks him to practice on SOMEONE.  
  
He doesn’t know how to deny his mother ( _and her effervescent love that he needs so much_ ) anything, so he learns and tries to use his pheromones to make the staff happy. When she shows him strong emotions ( _ones that are shaped by people’s strongest beliefs and fears)_ , describes how to tug them and make them all-consuming, he doesn’t practice on anyone for awhile.  
  
She thinks he’s reluctant, but Tony is plotting. Giving in to a morbid kind of curiosity for the first time in his life.  
  
He wants to know how Howard feels about him ( _distant and evasive, keeping to his study and never speaking to Tony outside of the workshop when Peggy was around_ ). He wants Howard to love him.  
  
But he also wants...  
  
He craves anything. ANYTHING. And he’s heard his father loves him, believes it, but can see his father’s love doesn’t match with his mother’s, which doesn’t match with either Peggy or Jarvis.  
  
He wants to give Howard’s love a name. He wants it to mean something.  
  
Sometimes he wants it to mean **everything** ( _because it’s stronger than anyone else’s and Tony...Tony is starving. He wants something that makes him feel present and real and...and like he deserves it_ ).  
  
So he hovers in Howard’s study like he hasn’t since Peggy came and his father looked at him like a warning. He builds with him, he takes his first sip of scotch, he sneakily reads all of Howard’s notes. He makes improvements to what Howard has already put together.  
  
A blow lands on his back ( _the same place Howard always hit - starting low on his spine and traveling up until blows landed on his neck and made him see stars_ ) and sets his ears to ringing.  
  
He grabs the warped feeling Howard is projecting - flat and sharp, metallic and wrong - and he tugs. He tugs with whatever version of that feeling he can conjure in himself ( _a pit seemingly opens in his stomach. When he prods at it mentally, it brings tears to his eyes. It tells him he’s empty and that he has to do more, has to fill the hole, has to-_ ).  
  
( ** _His hand extends. Opens. Something is placed in it_** )  
  
Tony smells salt.   
  
He smells electricity.   
  
He remembers chemistry, electrolysis, plating something with metals by passing on the ions-   
  
His thoughts stutter. His heart does, too. There is salt and metal and Tony's entire being is being plated with it, and-   
  
And-   
  
A-  
  
He comes to with his hand mangled, electrocuted horrifically by the energy cells he’d been working on. Howard is pale and screaming for Peggy.  
  
He smells like regret and self-loathing.  
  
Howard’s love is fear. It’s exhaustion, hatred, jealousy.  
  
And it’s some shade of love beneath the rest - an urge to protect, a wish to connect, the faintest whisper of what could have been a bond ( _something twisted up and hidden, a part of himself he had hidden in a cupboard and forgotten_ ).  
  
Howard’s love is an emotion left to fester. **It's rot.**  
  
They both lie to Peggy on the way to the hospital. They tell her that it was a shop accident. Howard’s tears and concern, the way he clutches Tony’s head to his chest, are enough to convince her he’s telling the truth ( _though Peggy sometimes walked in the gardens in the weeks afterwards, coming back in with suspicion in her eyes, notes scribbled on her skin, and telling Tony not to spend too much time with Howard_ ).  
  
Tony has a gnarled series of jagged lines running from his palm to his shoulder for the rest of his life. His left hand moves a hair slower than his right.  
  
After that, he slinks off to Jarvis’ Cottage to lick his wounds in peace. Jarvis doesn’t comment on the raw red skin or the emptiness of Tony’s expression. He just lets him crawl under the bed.  
  
He reads Tony one of Peggy’s trashy spy novels. He tells him all about intelligence campaigns in WWII and Vietnam - he’s checked out a bunch of books and read them just for Tony. He’s brushing up on Russian history because he likes debating with...  
  
( _Tony can hardly think the words years after Jarvis’ death_ )  
  
“Young Majesty.”  
  
( _When he lets the words cross his mind, Tony is always visiting the grave. They roll off his own tongue in a British lilt. He can never imitate the way Jarvis always put a dryly amused note into it, the papery scent of Jarvis and all his affection-_ )  
  
The lessons get harder after his incident with Howard ( _Maria’s emotions for her husband going cold. Going hard and steady, no longer effervescent, no longer free-floating and teasing. Tony’s heart clenched when she kissed him on the forehead and rubbed her wrists against his neck, her love so much more present and targeted than ever before. “You are mine, carinyo.” She whispered furiously, “And I am yours. **Forever**.” He didn't bond her - he was too afraid of the edge in her scent, sickly sweet and drugged_ ). He finds himself in Jarvis’ cottage whenever his instincts crawl up his throat.  
  
Whenever he got sick and tired of the suppression, whenever he wanted to be HIMSELF, he hid away with his first ever pack member. Jarvis could weather his emotional storms with Beta steadiness. He could teach him to communicate without his pheromones in ways Peggy never could, could teach him to speak with his hands in ways that weren’t intended to dissipate his scent, how to restrain himself without feeling like he was repressing himself.  
  
A British stiff upper lip. Humor hiding sincerity, sarcasm, misdirection for the plainer things in life.  
  
Jarvis let him make friends in storybooks ( _playing pretend at being a spy, acting like one day he won’t have to do this anymore_ ). He took Tony’s metal trinkets and kept them on a shelf display proudly. He never left like Peggy did ( _guilt written in the way her whole body slumped_ ).  
  
He stayed away from Howard and Maria though it strained his bonds to them. They never spoke of it, but Tony was certain Jarvis knew he needed someone uninfluenced ( _a place to hide, a person to hide with_ ).  
  
Jarvis apologized to him once and only once. A simple,  
  
“I’m sorry.”  
  
With no explanation, wiping at the blood seeping from Tony’s lip ( _lining the tongue that had formed Tony’s first act of defiance towards his father - his first rocksteady 'no' in a long series of them_ ).  
  
Tony is desperately lonely every year he is homeschooled, but in Jarvis’ cottage he almost feels...connected. Happy. Alive. In his own household, his negativity eventually managed to force Maria to keep her distance ( _an opiate scent lining her own more and more often_ ).  
  
He wonders if this is all he will ever have when Peggy comes to him in the cottage, a packet in her hands.  
  
“Would you like to go to school, Ducky?”  
  
She asks him, shoulders straight and red lips sweetly concealing sharp teeth. He meets her dark brown gaze and knows that she’s fought for this - had dragged his father through Hell behind closed doors for this.  
  
That she’s giving him a choice, one no one has had a chance to coerce. One even she won’t say anything about.  
  
Tony, ever hopeful, once bitten twice shy but never shy ENOUGH, says yes. Because it’s what he does. Tony always says yes to a chance to change his future.  
  
He’s 13 and he says yes. He lovingly strokes a brochure for MIT and says YES. And when Peggy tells him he has one last test to complete, one more gauntlet to run, he says yes.  
  
Jarvis says no. The only hard no he’s ever given to Tony. He goes to Howard and he slams the study door, but Tony still hears Jarvis shouting. He can’t make out any words but,  
  
“No. Absolutely not - he is a CHILD!”  
  
It’s Tony’s choice, though. And Tony? **Tony says yes.**

_______

  
What follows is the worst year of his life - past, present, or future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Both Peggy and Howard are super low-key implied to have been raised Jewish / have rejected the Jewish community in favour of prosperity (Howard) and a ideological freedom (Peggy). Both of them, having lived through WWII, have some lingering guilt over it. For Peggy, this past guilt is particularly arresting / encourages a sense of trust between herself and Howard that isn't particularly deserved. 
> 
> Peggy's will get addressed in more depth in Blueprint Specials, as will her connection with Howard, though I don't intend to address Howard's much more.
> 
> Implications are super low-key since First Burn is primarily Tony-centric and he is unaware of all of this / Peggy isn't particularly conscious of her guilt. The next chapter shows some of the compartmentalization her and Tony both do.


	4. You Have to Scream

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony makes it to MIT...but he has to go through That Year first.
> 
> TW for mentions of people (in MIT) having sexual contact with a minor / drug use as a minor. Tony's playboy days began in MIT and...considering his age........that's super gross. It's not his fault because he doesn't KNOW, but the fact that THESE PEOPLE ARE SUPER IN THE WRONG doesn't show up much in Tony's own thought process, which is unfortunate af.

There is a constant thread that weaves between Peggy and Maria's lessons to Tony. It's the unintentional connection between them. A red string of fate that wraps around Tony's throat.   
  
Makes him choke.   
  
It's called strangling your feelings for a reason ( _he envisions his hands squeezing around his own heart, sometimes. Pictures tightening his fingers and making everything that makes Tony **Tony.**..smaller. Jarvis looks troubled when he talks about it, but Jarvis looks troubled often lately. He doesn't think much of it)_.   
  
Between every lesson is a miniscule comment from Howard. Small and sharp ( _like fibreglass - they embed themselves underneath his skin and make him itch_ ).  
  
_Build this, learn this, do better._  
  
That's the standard comment. It's the one that digs in the deepest. It drives him to work harder, he thinks.   
  
_Stop with the emotions, Tony._  
  
_Stop with the weakness._  
  
That one lingers, especially when Maria tries to show him how strong emotions can be used to control someone. He sees hers controlling her and he...he doubts her. He doubts himself.   
  
He sees Howard call in a psychiatrist and doesn't question it ( _that's not true - he does ask. He asks so many times that there's a scar just above his left eyebrow shaped like Howard's heavy signet ring. He doesn't like to remember that. Doesn't like remembering how he asked Jarvis to keep an eye on his mother instead of himself. Because that just makes him think, in his worst moments, that maybe he shouldn't have asked-_ ).   
  
_Stop worrying, Tony._  
  
_Stop bothering me about it._  
  
**_Stop everything._**  
  
He tries. He tries hard to stop everything, however Tony just feels too much. He's just too much ( _except Jarvis still lets him chatter for hours in his cottage, asking about everything from his war exploits to the herbs he grows in the windows. He never seems to tire of the way Tony talks. He never tells him to stop anything, even when Tony makes him sad).  
  
Fine, you need to make everything about yourself? _  
  
_Get angry then, Tony. Be a man._  
  
Peggy puts a stop to that quickly enough. Her shoulders straight, her hair perfectly curled, her lip curled to match - she tilts Tony's chin up and looks down on him from above as she tells him,   
  
"Anger is a vice of weaker men than you."  
  
There's an implication in her tone that sinks through him ( _slides down his spine and into his toes - she's talking about his father_ ),  
  
"Be dauntless if you must be anything, ducky."   
  
Being dauntless is easier than stopping. His mind can still hurtle down tracks of thought like a runaway train if he's dauntless ( _he can still be reckless and creative as long as he's unflinching in the face of what he creates. He just has to keep his shoulders Peggy Carter straight_ ).   
  
_Stark men are made of iron._  
  
Jarvis sighs and runs his hands over Tony's shoulders ( _"Young majesty..."_ ), down his arms, curling gently around his wrists - settling just on top of the bracelets his mother has given him. He asks Tony if he prefers being touched skin-to-skin over skin-to-metal. The answer is obvious.  
  
Jarvis tells him that there's no point in being iron, then. It helps a bit. Still...  
  
Howard's words mean **something**.   
  
Sometimes they mean **everything**.   
  
As time passes, he begins to wonder if the same comments are slipping under Maria’s skin, just like an offer of release from her anxiety had ( _she’d thrown away the drugs so many times, but they kept reappearing. She was happier with them, more focused on him, and so Tony didn’t put them in the trash himself_ ). He wonders, yet he still goes back to the workshop ( _to build, to create, to hear-_ ).  He wonders and Howard tells him to focus, calls him worthless ( _tells him that he loves him_ ). 

He wonders after he’s been scarred and Howard’s words still MEAN something ( ** _everything_** ) to him. They stick in him. They stick in his mother and, through her, to Jarvis ( _stiff-backed and teeth grinding, knowing even back then that if he left, if he took Tony with him, he'd never get away with it_ ). He can tell that they even stick to Peggy, resilient as she is.  
  
Howard’s love was all rot, but Tony will use those lessons to make it through the next year.   
  
He builds a man of iron and wears him like a suit.

  
_______

  
Once and only once, Maria asks Tony if she’s failed him. He tells her,  
  
"No, no madre, you’ve done your best."

For some reason it makes her cry.

  
_______

  
He misses when his mother was lucid. Being an Omega is more frightening when only Peggy is by his side. She's more comfortable in her Beta skin than she ever was otherwise, but Tony...  
  
He doesn't even know what kind of Omega he is.

_______

  
Once and only once, Maria cups Tony's face and tells him, gaze hazy with the her latest prescription ( _paranoia. That's what the doctor's said plagued her. They eyed Tony with malice in their every movement and he held his breath until they left. He didn't want to smell something like them_ ),

“I’m worried you’re turning out all wrong.”  
  
Tony tells her he loves her and tucks her into bed, soothing her with his scent and wondering if he...if he could have replaced the drugs. Maybe if he were stronger, maybe if he was a proper Omega, he could keep her calm all the time. 

Tony thinks...he thinks she’s right. He's turning out wrong.

He tells Jarvis about it. Jarvis tells him he’s wrong, that he’s just learning, but Tony...

Peggy told Tony countless times how to spot a lie.

And Jarvis?   
  
He's lying.

_______

  
Tony thinks about several things a lot during That Year. He thinks about Howard’s little comments. He thinks about his mother. He thinks about turning out wrong.

Then he pulls his shoulders Peggy Carter straight, because he won’t let this life eat him alive.  
  
( _She tells him something, mouth twisted and unsure. It's something from her heart. Tony thinks not many people get to listen to Peggy Carter's heart. **"Hold on."** She says, " **Hold on and hold out."**_ )

  
_______

  
In That Year ( _the one Tony hadn’t named in the massive chronology that filled his brain, picture-perfect memory giving him every moment of his life in minute detail_ ), Tony and Peggy paid a visit to SHIELD. He was nameless then. It's the only time in his life he ever had been.  
  
A nobody in a sea of nobodies.   
  
They follow winding paths and pass through unmarked doors to meet a special ops team. It's run by a young black man no older than 18. His Beta scent was unusually rich, blending perfectly with the leather coat he wore. It's...intriguing.   
  
What's more intriguing is his eyepatch, one that matches Peggy's perfectly. Tony wonders if it's a sign of admiration. When he asks, the man doesn't react, but Peggy snickers.   
  
The Beta wouldn’t give Tony his name until That Year was completed - he said it was incentive to do well. He regularly gave Tony 'incentive' with tidbits of information. It didn't take him long to realize that the Beta was concerned - he knew everything about Tony, followed his exploits closely, and always **always** let Tony see his hands ( _never hiding them in pockets filled with weapons, not even later when Tony had his own_ ).   
  
It's obvious that Peggy trained him well as her protege. It was equally obvious that the course Tony was presented with was something she had created ( _she eventually admitted to Tony that she still trained teams when she wasn't working as a professor at Cambridge. "I get restless with civilian life." She explained, picking at a hole in his sleeve and clucking her tongue, "I suppose you will now, too."_ ).   
  
Her training course was based on what she did to herself and what was done to her when she was caught the first time as a codebreaker, then later when she became a spy for the SOE, looking for her brother in the camps and tearing the Nazi regime apart from the inside. It goes above and beyond the standard interrogation training, past cover stories, and surpasses even the lessons taught in propaganda operations.   
  
Peggy calls it stress training. The Beta calls it a form of social sabotage.   
  
The key tenets were as follows:   
  
1) You are a collection of masks. There is no one true self. If you take one off, let your enemy see the one below and believe it to be your true face.   
  
2) No one emotion is separate from another. What you cannot suppress, twist instead. What you cannot twist, misdirect.   
  
3) Every piece of information your surrender, true or false, is a sabotage. Use it to identify the goals of your enemy, then use them to win.  
  
4) Catalogue your bonds, your claims, your pack. Catalogue your enemy's. These are chips on the table - they are visible and they will be used. Make your gamble wisely.   
  
5) Knowing a lineage is the greatest weapon you have. Don't let anyone know yours.   
  
6) Always have props to support your claims. Know how to identify props for what they are.  
  
7) Always have quirks. Don't be unoriginal or uninteresting - have features that distract from ones you wish to conceal. 

8) Never believe you're safe.   
  
Peggy's course wasn't aimed at escaping capture, not really. It was aimed at surviving it. A spy course for POWs.  
  
And Tony was going to run through it.

  
_______

  
In That Year, Tony is kidnapped right out of his bed by a team of women in black, all of whom are wearing scent-proof masks and dark goggles. Their body armour doesn’t let any of their emotions leak out. Tony can’t see or smell any of their intentions. He can’t manipulate them as an Omega.  
  
He holds on to his Beta cover story for three days, then cracks. His scent is pitiful and begging for attention, for help, for anything. It’s strong enough that a hairline crack in an operative's mask drives her to spring him from his captivity.  
  
And she gets caught running off with him.  
  
He has to watch her get dragged away amidst murmurs of how dangerous he really is. Tony doesn’t feel very dangerous at the moment. They chain him to the wall and ask him,  
  
“You know what happens to Omegas who get kidnapped?”  
  
He doesn’t know, though he learns soon enough. Aunt Peggy always said he was a quick study.

  
_______

  
( _Empathy was the weakness of every Omega. They didn’t like being around distress. They always tried to soothe it by forming a personal connection - not always a bond, but often one_ )  
  
( _They liked to take care of people_ )  
  
( _Were easy to Stockholm if you thought about it_ )

  
_______

  
Tony doesn’t figure out how to spring himself from the simulations until number 5. He doesn’t even remember number 5 - all he knows if Peggy came to get him but he got away first. He knows he didn’t use his scent as a weapon because his papers still marked him as a Beta.  
  
He doesn’t remember the butterfly blade he constructed or the sheath he hid in his clothes. He doesn’t remember identifying every weakness in the body armour his captors wore by simulation 2.  
  
There’s a tiny Omega woman at SHIELD who remembers him years later though. She has a round scar on her cheek and respect in her gaze - she snaps him a salute whenever he’s around.

_______

  
Simulation 5 is what drives Peggy to take him home. She can't remember why she ever agreed to let him undergo military training, why she ever thought a 15 year old should be raised like a spy, and she's damn certain he never should've been put in a situation where he thought weapons were a necessity ( _she thinks of wide blue eyes and a snowy day. She thinks of a body covered in guns and an easy-going laugh-_ ).   
  
It takes a week and a half to move from the secure facility he's been learning in to a civilian city. It's dumb luck that he gets kidnapped a day after they cross the border back into the States. It's even dumber luck that his kidnapper's stress-test him in hopes of finding out his assignment ( _wanting to sell the information, probably. Hoping his responses could be used again in the future for other kidnappings - a cycle of ransoms that could keep them rich for years_ ).   
  
Peggy bursts in, guns blazing, and cooly destroys every piece of evidence Tony's kidnappers ever existed. She brings him back to SHIELD without a word, simply handing him an old leather jacket on his way in ( _rubbed down with her scent for years and years - a comfort item. Oddly enough, it's in a men's size and has been patched in a few places with harsh blue fabric_ ).  
  
Years later, he wonders if it was dumb luck or destiny. Not that it matters, anyway.

_______ 

  
There’s an interlude after simulation 6. Peggy comes to speak to him, bringing Jarvis along to keep their bond alive _(to let Tony hear his title again in person - "Young majesty" filling his chest with warmth_ ). He rubs up all over both of them shamelessly before remembering that he’s a Beta now.  
  
He’s not supposed to do that ( _tenet 4, tenet 5, tenet 8)_.  
  
The following dissociation is strong enough that Jarvis panics. Him and Peggy fight. Tony doesn’t know exactly what was said, only that Peggy offers him a way out afterwards ( _despite the way her jaw goes tight_ ).  
  
She tells him he’s learned enough to act normally under most conditions. Mentions that his last kidnapping might be the last one and praises him for not cracking during it ( _it was only for a day. It was nothing in comparison to simulation 5_ ).   
  
'Most conditions' is unacceptable. Anything could happen - he has to prepare for everything ( _tenet 8_ ). He can’t even begin to imagine not being ready for ( _Howard’s sudden mood swings, the way his life changed so suddenly and violently after he presented, the way his mother was silently and subtly taken away from him, a simulation going wrong because somebody startled him at just the right time-_ ) everything.  
  
Tony pushes to continue. By now, he has learned that Peggy worries over what happened to the Howlies. That she thinks, sometimes, it might’ve been her fault for not doing more or **being** more. He knows she feels guilty about what’s happening to him. And he also knows she’s doing it because she’s afraid of what will happen if she doesn’t.  
  
These are pieces of information she has surrendered to him. He has permission to use them - Peggy is dauntless. Ready for anything. Even for him to betray her trust ( _tenets 3 and 4_ ).   
  
He plays to it ( _tenet 2_ ).  
  
( _The guilt he feels later is crushing. Even as he's subjected to isolation, his guilt stays with him. Even when he is forced to hear news of his own death, or is ransomed for money, has to listen to his captors be kind to him - the guilt is still there. He twists and misdirects and does everything he can, but tenet 2 fails him_ )  
  
“Pegs,”  
  
He says,  
  
“You and me both know that I’m going to engineer a new future.”  
  
He winks at her, lets his scent go Beta-fresh and reassuring ( _tenet 1_ ),  
  
“I’m going to be famous, right? Famous people get kidnapped.”  
  
She doesn’t laugh. She just watches him sharply ( _always so careful and assessing, loving even when she pushed him to the brink. He’s certain if he ever asked to go home, Peggy would take out her own people to make sure he got out immediately. She is betting on him here - betting on him to make this choice and live with it_ ).  
  
“There will be weapons, Peggy. And wars.”  
  
Tony leans his forehead against her chest and lets himself soak up her strength for just one moment ( _fortifying himself for when he’d have to go back, letting himself forget the tenets for now_ ),  
  
“There will always be wars. And where there’s war, there’s me. Building, improving, keeping our troops safe.”  
  
She doesn’t flinch at what he’s saying. He knew she wouldn’t - she doesn’t have to. The fact that she isn’t dragging him out of here kicking and screaming is testament to the fact that she agrees with him.  
  
“People aren’t going to like that. So what’s happening here? It’ll happen there, but it won’t be under your watch and it won’t be safe.”

  
_______

  
Sometimes Tony wonders, knee-deep in a bog with no one in sight, carrying a handmade crossbow and a lot of pent up fear, what would’ve happened to him if most of his family hadn’t been in the war. If Jarvis, Peggy, and Howard hadn’t served. If they hadn’t seen the things that they had.  
  
Would Tony still be here, slogging through the mud while trying to upkeep soft Beta irritation? Or would he be in high school, having the occasional outburst and ruining lives without feeling bad about it?  
  
Would he have been normal? Almost normal? Would he be put on suppressive drugs for the rest of his life?  
  
He’s captured moments later and taken back to the cottage he’d just escaped. He’s forced to build a weapon he knows will be turned on him quickly enough.  
  
Tony decides to stop thinking about it. He’s made his choice - there was no point in dwelling on the past ( _tenet 8 - he wouldn't have been safe in any other life anyway_ ).

  
_______

  
"I would have made you go home if kidnapping was the only problem."   
  
Peggy tells him, taking him down from behind after lulling him into a false sense of security with her familiar scent,   
  
"But your father...he's not the man I once knew."   
  
Flat on his back and gasping for breath, Tony wonders if he's ever met the man Peggy once knew. His father is inspiring when he wants to be. He can be loving sometimes. He's brilliant - Tony knows these things ( _knows that Howard has festered for years. That there was something underneath the rot that loved him_ ).   
  
"Howard is pack."  
  
Peggy says, forcing him to yield,   
  
"But tenet number 4...he was a bad gamble. I'm putting my money on you now, ducky. I'll make sure you survive him." 

_______

"I think your mother's anxiety hit me...a lot harder than I ever could have guessed."   
  
Is what Peggy whispers to Tony after yet another failure.   
  
"No."  
  
Peggy hisses to herself,   
  
"I could have guessed, but I was arrogant. I thought I could handle it - handle somebody that Strong."   
  
She grips Tony's shoulder. Her face has gone as white as her hair.   
  
"I'm sorry, Tony."   
  
She apologizes, but Tony barely hears it past the roaring in his ears. He wonders if he'll ever be the reason somebody has to apologize like that - if he'll ever steal away somebody's control so completely that it takes them months to fully realize it ( _tenet 8 - nobody is safe around him_ ). 

_______

  
In an abandoned warehouse, a child begs Tony for help after he's blown his cover ( _again_ ). He gives up his supplies to them - his sabotage kit and his lockpicks - like the fool that he is. What follows in a gruelling journey up a mountainside and dozens of offers to help that he has to refuse.  
  
He doesn't make it to the top ( _he makes some great jokes when agents handcuff him, though. Really, Jarvis would be proud - dry British wit was working well for him_ ).

_______

"Virginia Hall made a climb just like yours."   
  
Peggy tells him, wrapping him tight in shock blankets,   
  
"Only she made it to the top, ducky. She made it to the top with a false leg."   
  
Tony scowls and punches her weakly. Peggy arches an eyebrow and continues,   
  
"You want to know why? She knew how to identify _chemin de la liberté_ \- freedom trails - from dead ends."

_______

"Pearl Witherton's father was an alcoholic, too."   
  
Peggy said conversationally, carrying Tony's dead weight out of a burnt-out house ( _he'd managed to keep up the snark for a long time. Misdirection worked pretty well when he supplemented it with a bit of Omega. He just used, uh, a bit too much_ ),   
  
"And she was the best damn shot the SOE ever had. Used to imagine she was shooting at all the cash he'd wasted."   
  
Tony laughs weakly. In his next simulation, he builds himself a bluff gun and manages to smuggle a tracking signal out of his jail cell inside of it. When it's turned on him, it fires way off to the left.   
  
"Made that agent look like a drunken sailor."   
  
The nameless Beta growls. Peggy winks at Tony from behind his back.  
  
He nearly succeeds in that simulation. His extraction is minutes too late to prevent a pheromone micrometer from picking up hints of Omega.

_______

  
"Vera Atkins recruited me."  
  
Peggy taps to him in Morse after she's broken into the wireless communications he'd been using,   
  
"Picked me and a dozen other women out of a hundred nameless faces. Made us into something worth while - she called us her girls, even after I left for the Commandos."   
  
Tony switches signals, changes locations, and deftly worms his way into the home of a very nice Scotsman by smelling Beta-happy with an edge of childish neutrality ( _tenet 1 and a freedom trail taking him far far away_ ). He manages to evade capture for hours before Peggy appears behind him, saying conversationally,   
  
"She had to keep it a secret that she was Jewish - she had a lot of detractors when people found out. She lost a lot of agents and everyone said it was her fault. Maybe it was."   
  
Tony is thrown into an interrogation cell, sick to death of recurring failures ( _his successes few and far between, never ever complete_ ), and Peggy taps him on the nose.   
  
"But she found 117 out of the 118 she lost. She identified all of her girls and had them listed as killed in action - wouldn't let them be forgotten as civilians. And I call that a success." 

_______

The next time Tony is captured, his insecurities are dug into. He lets it happen. They shield his talents ( _his iron core, the one that makes everything a joke, the one that no one can touch_ ) from view well enough that, when he erases his scent completely and picks his way out of his cell, nobody even thinks to look for him for half an hour.   
  
Simulation 22 is pretty satisfying. The mountains are lovely this time of year ( _he nearly makes it to the top_ ).

_______

Near the end of The Year, Peggy starts accompanying him on simulations as an ally. At first he thinks it will make him weaker. He rages at her to go away, but she just sticks around until their bond deepens into something precious.  
  
She's hedging her bets - tenet 4 all over again.   
  
It’s used against them time and again, but the support he gets from it, from her - it makes him strong. Because Peggy is stronger than him. Because Peggy doesn’t need his help, doesn’t need him to save her, and definitely doesn’t need him sending her careening into an emotional spiral with his own outbursts. He’s her weak link and he’s not willing to jeopardize her trust.  
  
( _“Be strong, boy.”_ )  
  
( _“Stark men are made of iron.”_ )  
  
( _“Stop with the emotions. Stop with the tears. Stop.”_ )  
  
_(“I’m worried you’re turning out wrong, Tony.”_ )  
  
It’s probably what perfects his control. It’s also probably why he doesn’t leave the entire experience traumatized ( _at least, he thinks he doesn’t. The flinty look in Jarvis’ eyes and his clipped angry words imply otherwise, as do his offers to leave Stark mansion entirely_ ). It’s definitely the reason he finally succeeds on number 32.  
  
He leaves that simulation a Beta because both him and Peggy work together to conceal their bond. They don’t reveal distress when the other is hurt. They don’t respond to the other’s emotions, don’t ever react too similarly to anything, don’t touch when anyone is watching. Together, they reveal no crucial information and escape in record time.  
  
No one even thinks to use the micrometer on them ( _soon, it won't matter even if people do_ ).   
  
The nameless Beta comes to pick them up personally. He gives Tony his name ( _"Nicholas Fury." He says, like that isn't a ridiculous last name_ ) and doesn’t quite smile at him, but does slip some kind of music playing device into his pocket.  
  
“It’s a prototype. Holds a hundred songs.”  
  
Nick says, looking away as Tony’s gaze picks apart his barely existent tells ( _he’s embarrassed - hands hidden in the pockets of his leather trench coat - a true travesty -and glancing at the music player every few seconds, just when Tony wasn’t watching - he only knew because Peggy was_ ),  
  
“Figured you could use a reward, agent.”  
  
Tony grins, unrestrained as he works himself into his new persona like a well-worn glove ( _tenet 1. The first in many_ ),  
  
“Your name was enough, Nick-Knock.”  
  
He pulls out the multitool him and Peggy had made as she snorts, picking apart the device in his hand as Nick’s mouth twitched,  
  
“The amount of amusement I’m going to get out of that, Saint Nicholas, will last way longer than this,”  
  
He nods at the quickly disassembling music player,  
  
“Possibly can. Also...”  
  
Tony reaches out, wrist up, and lets Fury take a polite whiff of Beta amusement before whammying the guy with a solid wall of smug,  
  
“I’m not an agent, Fashion Director - yes I know who you are...”  
  
The smugness around Tony grew thicker, sweeter, oh so much better,  
  
“I’m a Stark.”  
  
The look on Nick’s face, the look on his AGENTS faces, when they finally realize who Tony is. Well. It’s almost worth That Year.  
  
Finally getting to go to MIT definitely was.

_______

  
Though it wasn’t at first. Like mother like son - freedom wasn’t quite what they imagined it to be.

  
_______

  
There’s something in Tony that’s twisted and close to breaking when he arrives in MIT. It’s warped from years of loneliness, from never fulfilling his purpose, never having enough people, never being able to GIVE anyone anything. Peggy and Jarvis had kept it from breaking ( _he wonders, idly, if this is what people felt when they went feral...?_ ), but that's the best they could do.  
  
It was almost easy to keep it tucked away at SHIELD. It didn’t have a place to thrive in concrete interrogation cells or jungle locations where he was fleeing for his life.  
  
MIT made it pulse within him, though, raw and wet like an open wound. He missed Jarvis, he missed Peggy, he missed his mother ( _she’d been lucid when he left and whispering in Peggy’s ear with a frown on her face_ ).  
  
Tony has lived most of his life in Stark mansion, largely alone, ignored in varying degrees over the years. People want to talk to him here - people LIKE him here. He doesn’t...quite know what to do with that. He jokes and he spins stories and he’s always moving like he had in boarding school ( _making sure nobody could ever catch him_ ). He learns and he builds and it’s incredible.  
  
Something inside of him shivers and screams and begs to be let out. It begs him to call Jan from years ago. It begs him to smile at the pretty boys, to earn a new flower to tuck behind his ear, and to hold hands with the pretty girls like he had as a child.

He has tenets now, though. He has tenets and flowers don't belong on Stark men. He's learned that lesson quite thoroughly.  
  
So Tony drowns these impulses in schoolwork. It works well enough - he’s a fairly popular Beta, a rich kid and a genius, and nobody seems to pay much mind to the awkwardness that shows up whenever Tony tries to be genuine. But then he keeps...not really making friends. Not making any bonds.  
  
There's an unnatural distance between him and his peers. Tony can't close that gap ( _counting down a list in his head, listening to his father's voice, "I worry you're turning out wrong" blending with "Be a man"_ ).   
  
People pull away a bit.  
  
It’s embarrassing to admit, but he tries to impress them. He treats them like he treated his father - he takes their work and improves on it, he follows them around when he’s interested and jams his nose in their business, he chatters and chatters until they can’t ignore him, shows off the latest thing he’s outdone himself with.  
  
Then he pulls away from them, awkwardly keeping himself in check and ensuring he doesn’t get too close. The transition gives people emotional whiplash and so, one by one, they leave him.  
  
It’s pretty well known that he thinks the world of himself, after that. That’s he’s annoying and secretive. A bit of a misanthrope.  
  
It burns, to be alone even after what he’d gone through ( _to feel like he was back in that house after That Year_ ). He could make people stay if he manipulated them, maybe. He wasn’t taught how to make people like him for long - only ever long enough to escape - but he could make it work.  
  
But...  
  
Tony’s afraid of what he can do as an Omega and is even more afraid of imitating it as a Beta. He also remembers Peggy’s face when she told him about his mother's influence on her.  
  
So people don’t like him much. Slowly, the thing inside of him is beginning to feel familiar. It feels like Howard.  
  
An emotion left to fester.  
  
It wants out - despite all his training, it wants out.  
  
He’s weak ( _“Stop crying, boy.”_ ).  
  
And so he starts drinking in earnest. He’s tried it before, alone with his father in the study, but Peggy had looked at him with such disappointment...  
  
( _His mother hadn’t, but it had been a day where she didn’t seem to feel much at all. Jarvis had been busy fussing over her tensely_ )  
  
Alcohol is good - great even. It keeps his emotions dull without strangling them - keeps people around without the need for emotional intimacy. He starts flirting around, because it lets him be close, lets him bask in someone’s scent, just for a moment like an Omega usually would.  
  
He starts doing drugs because the people who willingly touch him do ( _he’s freshly 15 and they need plausible deniability. He tries to understand their perspective, but it still hurts his feelings. The drugs make him feel hollow and it makes him nervous, makes him want to call his mother and ask her about this, but he doesn’t want her to worry_ ).  
  
But Tony has learned the value of control too well ( _was too fearful of losing it, too well-versed in what people could do to him if he did, what HE could do to people_ ) to let the addiction spread to unknown substances or dealers. He knows disappointing Howard too well to let it destroy his school grades (“ _Prove yourself, boy. Do it better.”_ ). He’s high functioning, he thinks.  
  
So when he’s not high, not partying, he’s drowning himself in high-level projects. The thing inside of him screams a little less loudly when he starts the project he eventually wants to be his capstone ( _building his own friends..._ ).  
  
Still, he runs himself into the ground within a year. His emotions never get the best of him outwardly. They never reveal his secret and he never accidentally bonds anyone out of desperation or loneliness.  
  
But his feelings do twist around inside of him. They come out...a little bit wrong.  
  
It’s thankfully impossible to trace with typical pheromone-measuring equipment, but Tony has been leaking a subtle kind of misery. And just like it had in boarding school, it makes nearby people angry and upset without even knowing he’s the source.  
  
When Tony is drunk at a frat party and wallowing in self-recrimination, it gets bad enough that an Alpha sitting with him just loses it. It drives his instincts wild to know there’s an unhappy Omega somewhere he can’t find, unhappy for twisted reasons he can’t help with. The urge to do something melts into outrage. He drags Tony outside to beat the shit out of him.  
  
He gets two blows in. Makes Tony bleed.  
  
And that’s when James Rhodes’ slams Tony with something like justice, peppery and thick, and something like fulfillment, like this ( _defending a drunk stupid Omega without a clue_ ) is what James Rhodes was always meant to do. He strides onto the frat house porch with a military step, growling lowly. His gaze is fixed on Tony’s bleeding lip.  
  
He throws the guy off, snaps his teeth inches from the fool’s nose, and then he crowds Tony against the door. James Rhodes is clearly barely holding back from touching as he checks over every inch of Tony to make sure he’s ok.  
  
He ruffles Tony’s hair and flips his wrist up for Tony to smell it - a gesture that some big bad Alphas used when they wanted somebody to know that they were safe. It was an old school gesture - spoke volumes of Rhodes’ background. Coupled with the way he ducked his head and lowered his shoulders, Tony know Rhodes was raised a gentleman.  
  
( _It was the beginning of another weakness for Tony. Peggy taught him to trust people who looked at him before anyone else and didn’t touch. Rhodey taught him to like any Alpha that was willing to make themselves small and safe_ )  
  
Tony took a whiff. Rhodes’ scent was thick and strong - Strong, actually. His lineage was obvious. He smelled like irritation, though not at Tony, placating and protective and...  
  
He smells like everything Tony needs in his life and more.  
  
The thing inside of him shrieks, louder than ever, and Tony ruthlessly crushes it ( _counting down a list of tenets_ ).  
  
He doesn’t whammy Rhodes with his grateful feelings, his delight in a sudden rescue, or his curiosity. He could, but he doesn’t. Instead he smirks, pats him on the chest, and says:  
  
“I coulda handled it, big boy.”  
  
Like a stupid asshole ( _tenet 1, the one that would follow him for the rest of his life_ ).  
  
Rhodes isn’t having any of it. Tony’s 15 - he’s tiny, he was shaking in shock after the first punch because it knocked his spine against the wall ( _starting low and moving higher, just like dad, just like dad-_ ), and he was bloody. Tony just grins wider, ducking under Rhodes’ arms and walking away ( _something that pissed off every Alpha caught up in their instincts_ ).  
  
“Sweet pea,”  
  
He laughed,  
  
“You aren’t going to get a single cent out of me for the save, so fuck off.”  
  
Rhodes doggedly follows him, still not angry ( _the urge to protect still calling out loud and clear with his pheromones_ ). He even produced a wet wipe from his jeans pocket and tried to dab the blood on Tony’s face.  
  
Tony knocks it away,  
  
“Fuck off, Christ. You a pedo or something?”  
  
He spits. Rhodes finally smells pissed off, but it’s annoyingly not at him. He looks Tony dead in the eye and takes a long whiff of his elbow where somebody had rubbed up on him with lust and something ugly.  
  
Tony yanks his arm away and starts jogging. Rhodes keeps up easily, but lets him get a bit of space.  
  
“Fuck off!”  
  
Tony pants. The world is spinning - he’s still drunk. He’s drunk and angry and his brain is SCREAMING. He sways and Rhodes, the absolute bastard, steadies him to wipe his face clean.  
  
“I don’t-“  
  
Tony swats at his hands and snarls. He makes himself smell Beta angry, nips at Rhodes’ hands, and finds himself Beta furious when Rhodes actually laughs.  
  
“I don’t need help! Stop it!”  
  
Tony kicks him in the shin and takes off. Rhodes catches up, snags him by the collar, and hauls him back to Rhodes’ dorm ( _wriggling and swearing drunkenly - he wonders if Peggy would be disappointed in him. Over 30 simulations, and he's captured by a student_ ).  
  
The splitting migraine he’s developing reduced Tony’s complaints to whimpers by the time Rhodes pulls open his door. He manages to make it back up to shrieking though when Rhodes shoves Tony, fully clothed, into a warm shower. He washes the party right off of him, washes off the people Tony has been letting touch him, washes off whatever pathetic links Tony has less than half-formed with MIT’s party crowd.  
  
He’s spitting mad when Rhodes drags him out and towel dries him. He bites the older Alpha at least five times ( _he leaves a scar on Rhodes' right index_ ). Still, Rhodes continues to smell protective and pitying. He tucks Tony into his bed and sits on him until he stops struggling.  
  
Tony is out like a light mid-sentence ( _“You wanna fight, dipshit? We can-“_ ).  
  
Rhodes sleeps in front of the locked door, guarding him from anybody who might come looking for him. And people from the party do - whether it’s been obvious or not, Tony has been influencing the crowd he’s been hanging out with. They’re attached to him in strange ways, a lot of them negative. Rhodes had noticed all the eyes turning his way from the windows of that frat house and had seen the issue coming ( _his protective instincts screaming that something was wrong with the too-young Beta and that people knew it_ ).  
  
Misery loves company, and Tony’s has gone toxic.  
  
Tony sleeps through two fights. Rhodes puts some hazy drug-addled girls out on their asses. He hopes they’ll be more level-headed in the morning.  
  
( _He can’t help but notice only Strong lineages are hanging around by his door. A lot of them are even Stronger than him_ )  
  
When Rhodes returns to the bedroom to put another blanket on top of Tony, smelling like blood and fight, Tony wakes up. He squints at the Alpha and pats his face gently.  
  
Rhodes can’t resist telling him he smells peaceful and pinching his cheek ( _too thin, instinct tells him. This kid needs to fatten up_ ).  
  
When Tony wakes up properly in the morning, he can detect the glittering edges of his own damned Omega pheromones and he knows Rhodes knows. Even after That Year, he’s still a fucking screw up.  
  
( _“Do better, Tony.”_ )  
  
( _Story after story of the Howlies, of Captain America, always strong and just. Tony sits through them, wondering why he’ll never compare_ )  
  
( _“Do it better, boy. Prove yourself!”_ )  
  
( _Going through That Year, being so weak Peggy has to offer him an out, snuggling up to Jarvis so quickly-_ )  
  
( _“You’re a disappointment. Shape up. Stark men are made of iron.”_ )  
  
( _ **Fuck**_ )  
  
With all the silent efficiency he’d learned from Peggy, Tony escapes without waking Rhodes ( _asleep on the floor by the bed_ ). The second he gets out of the dorm, he runs.  
  
He doesn’t sleep a wink at home. Instead, he plans out what he’ll do when Rhodes sells him out.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I chopped this chapter in half because there was so much Rhodey that it needed it's own thing.
> 
> For all that Tony's training is worth in high-stress scenarios, it doesn't do much for him around normal people who don't anything from him. It helps him out a lot as a business man, as a public figure, as a famous man concealing his true identity, but it REALLY screws him in the friends department. It also makes romance a little...well. Relationships are build on honesty. There's a reason spies mostly marry other spies and very infrequently have children.
> 
> IMO this chapter really shows the ways in which Tony is emotionally stunted despite his empathy and desire to be liked. You can see that he GETS Peggy, understands his father, his mother, Jarvis...but doesn't manage to make much of it in a healthy relationship sense. He now has the mask of Tony Stark, but he doesn't really know who that is, y'dig? Poor kid is 15 and has never had a friend. 
> 
> Also, the women mentioned in this chapter are real people! They all have super cool stories~! Some of the tenets here and the training is based on what the SOE did during WWII, as well as some Camp X activities and operatives that took part in the French Resistance.


	5. Don't Take Another Step in my Direction (Helpless)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony can't quite figure out James Rhodes. He also can't figure out how to make him go away.

Avoidance is the name of Tony’s game.  
  
The first day is the hardest. Rhodes, as luck would have it, is a tenacious man. He’s also in several of Tony’s classes...specifically his favourites. He could accept skipping differential equations for engineers, but missing out on advanced programming and aeronautics is infuriating.  
  
How dare James Rhodes study what Tony studies! Seriously, how had Tony NOT noticed an Alpha this Strong in three of his seven lectures ( _eight if he counted the class he kept sneaking into, which he did because he’d stolen an exam and ACED it, thank you very much_ ).  
  
Rhodes is clearly waiting for him when he shows up to class. He has, unbelievably, a goddamn boxed lunch in his hands and a determined look in his eyes. He doesn’t follow Tony when he flees, but Tony would bet it’s only because Rhodes knew they had another class together that day. Tony, being Tony, flees that one, too ( _his footsteps barely covering an annoyed growl_ ).  
  
His professors send him agitated emails about attendance ( _which he has admittedly gotten a little lax about with differential equations so early in the morning and his partying occurring late at night, but he’s offended about the one from his aeronautics prof. Tony has never missed her class before!_ ). They say another student took notes for him and Tony would bet money on exactly WHICH one they were talking about.  
  
Rhodes wouldn’t corner him that easily. If he wanted to ransom money from Tony for his secret, he’d have to try harder.  
  
It’s tough to never even enter Rhodes’ field of view, but he manages. He’s been trained to operate best under stress at this point ( _or to only operate under it, really. He was beginning to find that procrastinating for tests did him all kinds of favours_ ).  
  
Tony skips out on parties, on class when he can, avoids all his usual eateries, only sneaks into his lab late at night with the assistance of janitors...the schedule is rough. He feels isolated and alone during it. It may have driven him to egg Rhodes’ house once. Maybe.  
  
Ok, he definitely egged Rhodes' house. Peggy's training was useful for something - he never got caught.   
  
It takes Tony awhile to realize that he can come to class and Rhodes will leave him alone. He still stubbornly carries around a boxed lunch on the daily, but once Tony starts slipping in to class five minutes after it begins from the window, Rhodes gives up on actually talking to him.  
  
Unable to resist a mystery ( _“That will get you killed some day, Ducky.” Aunt Peggy’s husky voice sighs over the phone, “Though it hasn’t killed me yet, so maybe you stand a chance.”_ ), Tony starts watching Rhodes for signs of a grander plan.  
  
People are always around Rhodes. He has a pretty sizeable pack, one that orbits around him beautifully. Tony takes note of the lack of satellite members - Rhodes probably isn’t a Redline then - and the sheer amount of loose pack bonds, people who drifted easily in and out of Rhodes' space.  
  
Definitely a Strong Alpha. Strong enough he should give Tony trouble after getting a whiff of his over-the-top Omega pheromones. Carbonells were always incredibly attractive to high lineage types. Maybe Rhodes’ instincts wouldn’t let him sell Tony out...no those would have worn off sometime in the past few weeks...  
  
Still, Rhodes doesn’t use his pack to track Tony down. He doesn’t even use them to deliver that stupid lunch. Instead he wanders around campus organizing sporting events and a chess club, constantly rubbing up against his people and snarling at any asshole who looks at them sideways. He’s constantly calling his family back home ( _when Tony investigates, he finds out the guy is from some big Alpha military lineage. Highly in demand in the forces, known to be protective, extremely close with all his relatives and visits twice a month - Tony thinks of Jarvis and aches_ ).  
  
When Tony gets his ass kicked again, one of Rhodes’ packmates pulls him out of the fray. She smells just as protective as Rhodes and that...that is just unacceptable.

________

  
Weeks pass and Rhodes’ behaviour doesn’t change. Watching Rhodes take on some jackass who had certain thoughts he felt like sharing about black engineers ( _and about one of the most popular Alphas on campus_ ) Tony realizes something.  
  
Rhodes isn’t going to corner him and cut a deal. He isn’t going to ransom his secret for money. He’s not going to do anything.  
  
Rhodes hasn’t told a soul.  
  
And it drives Tony insane. It eats at him during long nights hunched over homework. It steals away all of his attention until he can’t stand it anymore.  
  
So he checks his not-at-all creepy Rhodes schedule ( _that he stole from the registrar and then supplemented with some artful stalking)_ that estimated his location at any given time or day, finds his most likely location, and goes. At 9 in the morning. Before class - the thing he could have just waited for like a normal person.  
  
He’s a genius, but sometimes Tony didn’t make the best decisions. Sometimes Tony stays up late trying to plot his classmate’s motive for keeping his secret. Sometimes Tony does this multiple nights in a row while pestering janitors and other night staff for information about said classmate.  
  
He’s a genius. Really.  
  
Tony catches Rhodes on his way out of the gym. He LITERALLY catches him - grabs him and yanks him down the street to his house. Rhodes doesn’t struggle, though his sweaty arm does make maintaining a grip difficult _(“Always dust your hands, Tony.” Peggy instructs, flipping his palms up and dousing them in fine chalk when Tony has failed to grapple again in simulation 7_ ).  
  
He smells like pity and curiousity. Tony just smells pissed off.  
  
The second his door shut, Tony whirled and pinned Rhodes against it, posturing aggressively.  
  
“Why aren’t you asking for anything?”  
  
He demanded, blunt and to the point. He had the finesse to get information if he wants it. He could do this right - Agent FiFi it even with his doe eyes ( _“I know it’s not your favourite mask...” Aunt Peggy makes a face as if it isn’t hers either, though Tony knows what she was called in the war, “But you look sweet. Use it.”_ ). But he WANTS to see how Rhodes responds to his desperate confusion ( _he wants to know what kind of man just waltzes into a frat party and kicks a bully’s ass without explanation_ ).  
  
Tony has never quite stopped believing in people ( _tenet 8 hovers like a guillotine blade over his neck, but Tony likes to focus on 7 and 3 - always have quirks and every piece of information is sabotage. He’d fucked up, but he’d get something out of it. And so what if he believed in people? That could be his quirk_ ).  
  
( _Howard's voice calls him weak and Tony's left hand, electrical scars and all, stings. But Aunt Peggy hadn't trained him out of believing and that...that had to mean something_ )  
  
As it turns out, Rhodes barely responds. He just squints at Tony like he’s asked him a particularly stupid math question ( _proving two plus two equals fish or something equally banal_ ). Rhodes’ mouth opens and shuts a few times before he shrugs.  
  
“Man, not everybody is out to get you. Get over yourself.”  
  
He says, giving Tony a frankly impressive side-eye for somebody that was well aware of how many people were out to get Tony Stark ( _Tony KNEW he knew. Rhodes had come straight for him during that ass kicking like a man on a mission_ ). Rhodes looks a little awkward, probably realizing exactly how dumb that statement was, and shrugs again.  
  
“It’s your secret to tell. It’s been making you miserable, so I’m assuming you’re keeping it for a reason and not for fun.”  
  
Rhodes tells him. He’s not lying - Tony can’t see any of the indicators. As a Strong Alpha he’d probably be terrible at it anyway. Rhodes is being completely sincere ( _ugh, he reeks of it. His peppery scent is nearly enough to make Tony sneeze_ ).  
  
There's a tense moment where they just stare at each other. Tony quickly takes note of their positions, how best to leave the room, and whether or not he can convince Rhodes to forget all about this. Rhodes watches him closely, a furrow slowly digging itself between his brows.  
  
Slowly ( _as if he were approaching a spooked animal_ ), Rhodes leans forward and rests his chin on top of Tony’s head. Completely unprepared for it, Tony freezes. Rhodes snuffles unhappily at his hair, probably not picking anything up but Tony’s lingering Beta anger, and mumbles,  
  
“You’ve been miserable for awhile.”  
  
In a pinched voice. Tony knows he didn’t pick that up by scent - not consciously at least. Rhodes had been watching him and he...cared.  
  
To Rhodes, it was really as simple as that. Tony Stark had fake papers, a jacked up scent, Beta body language and it just...didn’t matter. What mattered was that Tony was miserable.  
  
Just like that, Tony can feel something terrifying shifting in him. He wants to reach for a bond - he feels like if he does it will be there in a short time, will form nice and easy for him. He’s always been so easy ( _Howard wasn’t wrong about that, at least_ ).  
  
Tony doesn’t reach for the beginnings of a bond, can’t anyway without hitting Rhodes with his real scent ( _possibly manipulating him, outing himself further, giving people something to use against him-_ ), but he does reach out. Grabs a handful of Rhodes’ sleeve and stares at his feet, unsure how to proceed.  
  
Tony wants-  
  
He **wants** , but he can’t-  
  
Then, there’s a hand in his hair. Rhodes is scratching at his scalp, rubbing behind his ears, getting his scent to stick to Tony protectively. It’s possessive. It says loud and clear,  
  
_“This one’s mine.”_  
  
Tony has always gone down easy. He’s never trusted anyone to catch him and keep him steady. Peggy and Jarvis couldn’t mark him as strongly as he marked them ( _even his fake Beta scent was stronger than theirs_ ), Weak assignments bound to his parents and to their duty as they were.  
  
They couldn’t make Tony belong to them as much as he wanted them to. They couldn’t come to MIT, hang around him constantly, keep their scent alive on his skin without a claim. Couldn’t coddle him, **touch** him, talk to him-  
  
But Rhodes? Tony reaches out and Rhodes grips back hard ( _Strong. Strong like a Strong Alpha - someone who could understand even a little-_ ), even without a mark or bond. He scents Tony and watches him closely to read him past his walls.  
  
He's already working around limitations he doesn’t even know WHY Tony has.  
  
His hands curl around Tony’s elbows, leaving his hands free, letting Tony resist him if he wants _(he avoids touching the scars that twist up Tony's left arm, ones he had almost forgotten about while he was with Peggy and other people with scars of their own_ ).  
  
He flips his wrist up for Tony to scent it, all Alpha sincerity despite the fact that it is RIDICULOUS _(Rhodes doesn’t need to prove to anybody that he’s safe. He’s not like Tony_ )  
  
Rhodes marks Tony up like he’s pack even though he won’t do it back. Makes himself vulnerable to someone who will never accept him _(makes himself look desperate - constantly hovering over Tony Stark, the Beta who won't bond_ ).   
  
He doesn't cross Tony's boundaries. He just...steps up to them and extends a hand.  
  
And he just keeps doing it. Tony kicks him out of his house that morning, shaken and confused, but Rhodes is on his doorstep in the evening to walk him to class. He’s back the next day with a coffee and blood on his knuckles. He has the goddamn boxed lunch, too.  
  
Somehow, Rhodes becomes Rhodey. He keeps a careful arm around Tony’s shoulders and comes with him to parties, pulls him home early with idle mentions of his pet project, marks him up so heavily that the people Tony flirts with wouldn’t even dream of touching him. He eats with Tony, sleeps with Tony, works with Tony while he keeps a couple of packmates sprawled around Tony’s living room ( _watching bad soap operas because Rhodey got them all into them and their revenge is to watch whenever he’s distracted_ ).  
  
When Tony finally realizes his whole apartment smells like Rhodey, he loses his cool for awhile. He goes on a panicked bender, tries to wash Rhodey out of his clothes and his sheets, tries to mark over him with other people.  
  
( _He’s beginning to suspect, just a teeny tiny bit, that his stress response might be something bad. The subtle misery staining the campus died away when he made a friend, and he can tell it is back now. Tony thinks he might be-_ )  
  
Hands tug at his clothes ( _the shirt that smells safe_ ) and Tony thinks, back in the part of his mind that is always clear and keeping him Beta-perfect, good. Good, take away that safety. It isn’t real. Rhodey isn’t Peggy. He’s not strong enough to hold his own if people try to use him against Tony or vice verse.  
  
He’ll leave if Tony doesn’t bond him and it will be for the best. Because Tony is still weak. He suffered through That Year and didn’t manage to harden his heart one bit. He only learned to lie a little better ( _tenet 8 always hangs over him, sharp and REAL, but Tony keeps laying his head on the chopping block. One of these days the blade would fall and take away more than just a mask_ ).  
  
Hands slide down his body and grind into his thighs. The scent of lust is heavy and rich, forcing Tony to inhale deeply _(an Omega, one that is trying to coax him-_ ).  
  
Rhodey kicks in the door, flanked by his packmates in full force. Together they make for a heavy oppressive atmosphere. The room is absolutely swimming in -  
  
Panic ( _Rhodey sweeping the room for the too-young, too-skinny, too-sad brat that had wiped his whole place down until Rhodey couldn’t smell himself_ ).  
  
Shock ( _finding Tony, too-young, always too-young even if he didn’t understand WHY, had never been allowed to see himself as a child, couldn’t realize the liberties people were taking, buzzed and sprawled out on a much older girl’s lap_ ).  
  
Fight _(tinted with a shade of murder, actual murder, the kind the agents smelled like when Tony successfully whammied them into springing him from captivity-_ ).  
  
There’s a scuffle. No one is touching Tony any more and he wishes he could drink a little more. He’s not willing to completely lose control, though. The Beta-perfect piece of himself resists the urge to reach for a cup.  
  
The scent of the room shifts like a tide - negatives sweep in and swell, then pull back until there’s nothing but...  
  
Satisfaction, rich and heavy in Tony’s lungs ( _the room is quiet now. It helps with the headache Tony’s been developing_ ).  
  
“Talk to me, Tones.”  
  
Rhodey demands, shaking Tony hard even as he curls around him,  
  
“What the Hell were you thinking!?”  
  
Tony hums and concentrates on the part of his mind that’s always clear ( _a safe place if he’s ever tortured or slipped drugs in interrogation-_ ). He takes a few moments to center himself as Rhodey keeps yelling at him. He’s thinking of what to say ( _of whether or not he wants to avoid this conversation entirely, of whether or not he wants to lay his head on the chopping block_ ).  
  
“I was thinking of getting laid.”  
  
( _“I can’t bond you. I never will.”_ )  
  
Tony eventually settles on. He grins at Rhodey, who rears back like he’s been hit. One of his packmates snarls.  
  
“I was thinking of taking someone home with me without them thinking I have a boyfriend.”  
  
( _“I’ll never be a member of your pack.”_ )  
  
Tony continues, shifting his gaze over Rhodey’s shoulder and focusing on the snarling packmates. He considers goading them. He knows it would distract the Alpha over him ( _Rhodey has bonds Tony could use against him. Everyone does. Except for Tony, with Jarvis back home and Peggy overseas..._ ).  
  
“I don’t need you. I’m not even yours.”  
  
( _“So you’ll leave me.”_ )  
  
He finishes, making sure to lift a cocky brow at the snarling guy over his ( _ex_ ) friend’s shoulder.  
  
And Rhodey...  
  
He just tucks his nose behind Tony’s ear and jams his wrist into Tony’s face. Tony tries to push it away, but Rhodey just pushes it back.  
  
“I’m not gonna hurt you, Tones.”  
  
Rhodey says, insistently waving the skin right under Tony’s nose ( _all Alpha sincerity and foolish hope_ ),  
  
“I promise.”  
  
Tony has always been easy. Shamefully, pathetically, consistently easy. He was trained to say no to everything, to stand on his own feet, to hide his heart no matter what. But James Rhodes wasn’t a kidnapper or a torturer.  
  
He was flipped wrists and Alpha sincerity.  
  
Tony can’t...he can’t say no to that, not even when Rhodey’s pack refuses to acknowledge Tony for months afterwards.

________

  
They topple into each other’s lives simultaneously. Instead of Rhodey hanging out at Tony’s, it quickly reversed. He wants Tony to meet the people important to him on a more personal basis than soap operas or watching Tony make a fool of himself at another frat party. He wants Tony safe in his territory. Or that’s what he says ( _he’s also a bit afraid of Tony wiping his apartment down again, prefers having their scents mingle somewhere he can control_ ).  
  
They still fight - Tony drinks too much and goes too fast, starting arguments with his professors and looking for attention in all the wrong places. He missteps constantly when it comes to little things in his own friendships. Tony understands Rhodey’s relationship with each of his pack members perfectly, but still struggles to understand the fact that Rhodey wants to know WHERE he is, HOW he is doing, WHAT he’s been up to. He still forgets to call, cringes away from gifts, doesn’t let anybody hand him anything directly ( _gnarled scars crawling up his left hand and arm that Rhodey desperately wants to know about_ ). Tony is secretive.  
  
They fight, but Tony can’t ever run all that far without Rhodey catching up to him. They fight, but Tony spits in his own supervisor’s face for denying Rhodey a position he knows he deserves, tears apart his own projects to supplement parts for Rhodey’s, and forces Rhodey to sit down and write grant applications ( _“You’ll get it.” He says, an imperious tilt to his chin that always makes Rhodey grin, “You’ll get it because you’re brilliant and then you’ll fund your own goddamn research as the ultimate fuck you-“_ ).  
  
Tony still tries to leave sometimes, but every time Rhodey is there with a flipped wrist and patience no one knew he had (t _he pack jokes about Tony being a stray alley cat. When Rhodey fusses over letting him outside because “What if he never comes back?” and about Tony eating random things, the joke becomes less of a joke and more of a pack truth. Tony’s Halloween costume that year has them in stitches_ ).  
  
Eventually, Tony winds up moving in with him and just...settles. The strung-out anxious teenager Rhodey’s been obsessively protecting seems to melt away overnight ( _he's still there. Rhodey KNOWS he is. But Tony is good at making people forget when he's stable_ ). He’s finally got something like pack to anchor himself - the closeness and constant contact emulating a bond ( _a bond Rhodey thinks they should have, though he always stops short of saying it. He’s realizing more and more that Tony has reasons for everything he does. They’re usually stupid reasons, but they aren’t stupid to Tony_ ).  
  
Rhodey would’ve thought Tony needed more people to get even close to settling down, but Tony is used to having just one person. And with Rhodey, he can make due, even without a real bond _(a strong one, one that ran as deep as his did with Jarvis, or even one like his and Peggy’s_ ).  
  
Seeing him doing so well with so little...  
  
Seeing Tony make due...  
  
Rhodey can’t help but want to do more - it’s in his nature. Strong Alphas can barely resist an Omega in distress, and Tony was definitely one of the Strongest Omegas he knows. Beyond that, Tony was both the cause and the solution to a lot of problems on the MIT campus ( _he’s seen Tony stress-testing himself with a frown, though Rhodey still doesn’t come clean about his own suspicions. If Tony is somehow...leaking emotion, he doesn’t want him to panic or to retreat even further into himself. There was a cagey look to Tony sometimes that he didn’t like - like he was something that had been kicked one too many times_ ).  
  
So Rhodey wants more for them both. He wants better.  
  
He wants MIT.  
  
It starts out small and experimental. He’s exceptionally wary of pushing this angry lonely little thing too far too fast. Tony is unpredictable at the best of times, too self-sacrificing one day and filled to the brim with retribution the next ( _as nice as it had been to see Tony’s supervisor nearly scream himself into an aneurysm, that little stunt had nearly fucked them both over horribly_ ). So he tries letting Tony know about the walk-home club.  
  
Chats him up about the group Rhodey had started to make sure students got home safe. Tells him all about how unsafe some of the younger students felt after dark. How embarrassed they were to ask for help from their friends.  
  
It gets Tony all worked up ( _always a sucker for a sob story or a friend in need_ ). Rhodey smiles to himself and high-fives one of his friends as Tony goes off on distracted rants about student safety to the cafeteria ladies, the janitors, some of his party ‘friends’.  
  
The experiment is a success - Tony is tiny but mighty. His words and his twisted up scent are inspiring. People want to help ( _him - they want to help him_ ).  
  
The ball keeps rolling as Tony starts to come out of his shell. He’s still painfully awkward with people who come at him with nothing but genuine goodwill, he’s still sharp-mouthed with those who don’t, however Rhodey manages to nudge him here and there ( _keep him from jamming his foot in his mouth, keep him happy_ ). It lets Tony’s motor mouth find them dozens of students causes and even more people with personal issues.  
  
Turns out, Tony has always wanted to help. He admits to Rhodey in the darkness of their room that it filled some of the hollow space inside of himself. Helping meant good things could happen to him ( _that he “deserved” them. Rhodey wanted to find out the origin of the exact tone with which Tony said that word. When he did, he was going to smother it to death_ ).  
  
Rhodey is more than happy to give him ways to help. He’s been organizing students around campus for a solid year now, keeping house with a vast loosely-bound pack, and he could use somebody like Tony by his side. The idea of keeping all his people happy and healthy by keeping Tony that way is...  
  
It’s immensely appealing. Makes him all giddy - Tony caught him dancing to Marvin Gaye in the kitchen constantly ( _danced with him, the sunlight sparkling in his floppy brown curls, and made Rhodey desperately crush the urge to just bond with him already. When Tony was happy, it was like...like Rhodey could change the world. He wanted to always feel like that_ ).  
  
There’s a weekly student lunch slapped together by funds from the Robot Fight Club tourneys they’ve thrown together. It targets a comprehensive list of students Tony had gathered with alarming efficiency ( _“The cafeteria people like to talk.” Tony shrugs, “And I couldn’t help but pick up some information skills from Peggy.” Rhodey is amazed that Tony can be this socially competent yet still so incapable of recognizing friendship_ ). Affording food becomes less of a struggle for students in the science and mathematics faculties.  
  
Some students put two and two together. Everyone knows Rhodey and his pack have been walking people home, patrolling campus, and keeping an eye on parties. They all know they can go to him for help. But this is something new - something that screams ‘Tony Stark’ in its indirect assistance.  
  
Something that fills their lungs with warm sunlight and contentment.  
  
Something that makes Rhodey think of Marvin Gaye songs in the kitchen, a broom in his arms, Tony crooning to him off-key and laughing.  
  
People start chatting Tony up more often. Casual chats that somehow give away most of their woes. Then, abruptly, those woes are being addressed by some club, event, or charity.  
  
The weekly luncheon becomes a daily thing. Tony and Rhodey have nothing to do with it - it just happens. They’ve been getting a lot of donations. Some of which are suspiciously British _(Rhodey meets Jarvis briefly, barely a moment, when the man aggressively teaches the luncheon staff to cook on a budget, then just as aggressively cuddles Tony while pretending he isn’t_ ).  
  
They try their hand at writing some grants for a struggling chemistry lab. It works. Rhodey is an especially convincing salesman and Tony has an exceptional head for budgeting.  
  
They write some more grants. Those work out, too.  
  
There’s a Stark donation that sets up some oddly specific scholarships. Rhodey’s church gets one set up, too.  
  
The wellness center on campus gets unbelievably good advertising from a group of robotics engineers, all of whom shush the staff whenever they try to thank them. All they ask is that Tony and Rhodey stop fussing over the wellness center’s budget. The staff go out of their way to ward Tony off from the bank books after that, much to his chagrin ( _Rhodey shakes his head fondly as Tony screeches, tiny yet mighty, about the injustice of it all_ ).  
  
Jarvis visits for a full weekend. He takes one look at Tony ( _who he refers to as royalty, making Rhodey do a triple take and making the old butler smirk_ ) before standing and heading to the kitchen. There, he aggressively bakes Rhodey an alarmingly fattening cake. It‘s almond-based and piled high with apricot jam, espresso whipped cream, and the richest crumbliest layers Rhodey has ever seen. It’s so good he almost cries.  
  
( _He does tear up later when Jarvis clasps his shoulder and tells him in no uncertain words that he’s Tony’s first friend. Right then and there Rhodey resolves to never leave him_ )  
  
( _Jarvis slips him some baby photos. He pins them in high places Tony can’t reach and laughs at his struggles...until Tony builds a device to reach them. They don’t talk about the device_ )  
  
( _Actually, they do talk about it. They talk about it so much. It’s an elevator with a face and a furby voice box. It was too terrifying for Tony to step into - the idiot thought it would be cute. They avoided it in their apartment for TWO YEARS before getting the courage to toss it. Rhodey’s pack is convinced it’s haunted_ )  
  
( _His mother gets a priest to bless it. It's her first time meeting Tony and Rhodey never lets either of them live it down_ )  
  
Tony publishes like mad. Rhodey’s not far behind him, actually. They play off of each other’s ideas and argue with their professors constantly - Rhodey could’ve sworn he was a level-headed man before he met Tony ( _that’s a lie, he just didn’t know how to get exactly what he wanted before he met Tony. He’d always been willing to run headlong into a good fight_ ). It spurs a wave of student publications that quickly turn into journal publications from people trying to keep up.  
  
The both of them are constantly rubbing elbows with brilliant people doing brilliant work. The first time a polymer chemist, an Alpha who was always shouting her emotions from the rooftops, tossed Tony into a puppy pile he nearly exploded from happiness. He’d bounced around their apartment for hours afterward, finally letting some of his Omega scent stick to Rhodey’s sheets. It happens again and again after that.  
  
A year passes, faster than either of them could have expected, and Tony finally turns 17 in a whirlwind of scientific advancement.  
  
The news calls it 'A Golden Age for Education'. MIT Science students jokingly call it the MIT Nerd Pack. Tony and Rhodey call it the beginning of the best days of their lives.  
  
The golden age is a healing experience Tony didn’t even know he needed and one of growth for Rhodey that shapes the thing between them immensely. It keeps Rhodey from going stir crazy at the blank space in his head and his heart where Tony should be, keeps people from recoiling from their strange situation, keeps them from saying what several people were beginning to think about Tony Stark and the balanced ‘pack’ he has formed with Rhodey.  
  
Still, not everybody is as understanding as a generation of students more concerned with success and where their next meal is coming from than Tony Stark’s status. The blank space inside of Rhodey takes on more significance than either of them ever could have predicted.  
  
When Tony goes missing, Rhodey has no legal reason to look for him.


	6. I Can't Be Trusted Around You (That Boy is Mine)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony begins to barrel forward into the truly destructive portion of his youth and James Rhodes, barely more than a kid himself, doesn't quite manage to come along for the ride. Nobody gets out entirely unscathed.

The apartment is quiet when Rhodey finally stirs ( _long past his usual time - not that he’s going to the gym this morning. His nose is running like a faucet and he feels like death warmed over_ ). Sunlight is streaming in through his window and hitting his face unpleasantly. Struggling to inhale, he finally gives up, rolls over, and blows his nose miserably.

Not being able to breathe is what woke him up.

And it shouldn’t have been.

Tony Stark, given the opportunity to be annoying, had never passed it up a day in his life. Drunk Tony was especially inconsiderate and had a penchant for asking Rhodey existential questions that Rhodey was pretty sure were intentionally cultivated ( _he'd caught wind of Tony sneaking in and out of philosophy lectures before_ ). 

Rhodey's heart rate was slowly picking up as he strained his ears ( _hoping to pick up the sound of off-key singing or too-loud music over the clatter of dishes_ ). He couldn't hear anything other than the sounds of traffic on the street outside. 

Sitting up slowly, Rhodey pressed the heels of his palms hard against his eyes until he saw stars. Think Rhodes: did he tell you he was staying the night anywhere? What was he doing? Where could he be? 

Tony had gone out the night before to help set up some astronomy bar night. He’d already been buzzed when Rhodey got home from class ( _coughing and swearing up a storm when he fumbled his keys in the front door lock_ ), kicking his legs out over the edge of the balcony with the light of the city and stars reflecting in his eyes. He'd looked happy. Rhodey hadn't been able to quite look away - tripping over the sofa on his way over.  
  
He'd been in a mood, himself, though it was hard to stay mad when Tony made grabby hands at him cheerily ( _chattering about his day and how he'd made Rhodey tea - it was cold and oversteeped due to him forgetting about it, but he'd tried_ ). When Rhodey complained about the idea of Tony being out all night ( _drunk and without someone to watch over him. Christ, Rhodey had wished his cold would end already or just end him_ ), Tony just chuckled and pointed straight up.  
  
”It’s about the stars, Rhodey!”   
  
He'd thrown his arms open wide with a wink, the near-Alpha exuberance in that gesture catching Rhodey off-guard,  
  
“It’s about the spirit of curiosity and opportunity! I can’t miss it.”  
  
Tony had laughed, some kind of private joke or just the alcohol talking, with his head tilting back. His unkempt hair falls away from where it has grown to hang over his eyes.   
  
He had looked happy. Rhodey hadn't been able to stop marvelling at how good that felt ( _even if he wanted to feel more of it, smell it in their apartment, hold it in his hands and plunge it so deep into Tony’s heart it could never be uprooted_ ).   
  
Rhodey presses his palms harder against his face. The memory stops. Stalls.  
  
It's a still in a movie - a sudden jarring stop where there should be motion.  
  
Tony wasn't staying anywhere...and he didn’t come home last night.  
  
Tony, for all his faults, always comes back to Rhodey unless he's committed some grievous misstep ( _stepped over some invisible line in the sand, leaving Tony quiet and vicious in turns_ ) or someone ELSE has done something equally bad. And when Rhodey had woken up this morning, after a long and peaceful uninterrupted rest, Tony hadn’t been there. Hadn’t woken him up at all to make sure his cold didn’t kill him in his sleep. Didn’t drunkenly ask him any questions about any project.

Didn’t even call.

There was no scent Rhodey could follow, even if every single instinct he had told him to track down that effervescent tinge of Omega that Tony rarely let out. There's nothing to even hint at where he is.

Nothing except other people.

( _Rhodey feels disturbingly alone. He hasn’t been alone, truly alone, since he was a child. Alphas like him always had somebody nearby, some kind of connection to hold onto, and even when they didn't, even as unpresented children, it didn’t feel like this_ )

With shaking hands, he makes his bed and snatches a sandwich from the fridge. It gives him a fleeting sense of normalcy ( _routine was important. He knew routine was important. He came from a military family - a military pack - and he knew how to get through even the worst of emotional storms with routine_ ). The kitchen is still clean from when he did the dishes last night. No half-empty coffee mugs litter the countertops.

"Shit,”  
  
Rhodey whispers, pressing his hands over his eyes again,  
  
“Shit!”  
  
He slams them down roughly into the countertop. Catching his breath and fighting down a cough, he gives into the jittery sensation running through his spine.   
  
He's got to DO something.

Rhodey goes hunting all across campus for his inner circle ( _pulling them out of class with an apologetic smile aimed at each professor_ ). He tugs his pack in close, feeds them with his determination and worry as best he can ( _if only he were an Omega, able to do more than this-_ ), and sets them loose with one goal: find Tony Stark.

It's possible Tony got to stargazing with someone in the astronomy department. That he found somebody who got him as well as Rhodey did, maybe, and just forgot to stop in at home. Another Omega like him, maybe.

He could be having another minor breakdown about some perceived slight, something Rhodey did before he left, and was taking the time to get over it alone _(even though he’d promised not to do that anymore_ ). Except Tony never missed class when he could help it, no matter the slight, and he hadn't been home to get his notes. 

Maybe somebody had discovered his secret.

Rhodey's standing with his forehead against their front door when his pack members come back to him. They all have the same thing to say, shifting nervously from foot to foot: no one they know has seen Tony since early yesterday. 

None of them seem to lose their breath at that. Not like Rhodey. None of their hearts seem to stop in their chests as thoughts of secrets cross their minds, of the desperate need to do something to keep them, of a promise, however wordless, he had made to protect-

In the company of people who love him, Rhodey has never felt more alone.

( _He wonders if they even looked that hard_ )

( _Then he wonders why he even thought that_ )

One of the Strongest Alphas amongst them, somebody Rhodey has circled for weeks before accepting her into his pack ( _Maya: always proud, always watching him quietly, waiting for him to show weakness before correcting it with brutal efficiency_ ), rests a hand on his shoulder. Her stoic facade cracks the slightest bit with a wince. She tells him her girlfriend stopped by the same bar Tony was supposed to be at last night.

According to her, Tony never even made it to the event.

And nobody told Rhodey.

He's absolutely furious ( _he could've been doing something hours ago - he could've been doing anything other than sleeping_ ). It's stupid. He knows it's stupid. No one would’ve known he usually waits up for Tony unless they were pack. Pack members knew he was sick and sleeping - not to be disturbed.  
  
It was implied, though, that everyone they touched was pack in a way. It was IMPLIED that Rhodey was with Tony, to wherever that took them, no matter what condition he was in.  
  
Someone should have told him. He should have known.

Why had he even bonded with these people? Why were they his if they couldn’t understand such a simple goddamn concept? Something so core to this pack's functionality - to what they'd built in this school and within this community? 

( _What use was his pack if they couldn’t stop one of their members from disappearing?_ )

( _What use was pack structure at all if it didn’t provide protection?_ )

( _What use was Rhodey?_ )  
  
Rhodey's thoughts are practically strangling him (held back to the best of his ability - breathe, one, two, three, breathe, one-) as he begins to walk with purpose. He needs to go. He needs to do something. 

He's still angry ( _scared scared scared)_ when he barges into the campus police station with a pack of uncomfortable students drifting along in his wake and his inner circle trying to ward off the potential of fight rolling straight out of Rhodey's skin. 

Everyone inside the station stands when he slams the door open. Each and every one of them can read the aggressive air he’s putting off, hands stubbornly fisted at his sides, walls all the way up ( _breathe, one, two, three, don't think about anything but the next step forward_ ). It's threatening. Rhodey KNOWS it's threatening ( _boiling with the potential for inducing a fight_ ).   
  
He makes his report. Maybe if he had've been able to get a hold of himself, it would have gone better. Maybe it wouldn't have. Either way, the officers form a tight circle around him and his pack when Rhodey’s scent goes truly ugly - thick enough to force those closest to him to breathe shallow and choked.  
  
He’s told it hasn’t been 24 hours and that Tony Stark had a history of...disappearances in the midst of a red haze of self-reinforcing anger ( _each breath stinging his nose, peppery and all together too much_ ). He's told that Tony probably isn't missing. Or, that if he is, he wants to be missing. Nothing they can do about it.

Rhodey can tell his closest pack members are nervous. He thinks they’d better not be nervous because they agree with these pricks.

( _When his little sister had disappeared for a day, running away during a temper tantrum, people had looked for her right away despite the fact that she didn’t go far. She was sitting in the ravine behind their private school, pouting because their mother didn’t want her going on dates yet, and they’d all KNOWN she would be there because she’d done it before. They still panicked, though_ )

( _She was allowed to be a brat every so often because they loved her_ )  
  
( _They loved her and the idea that anything could ever happen to her was unacceptable_ )

He has to be restrained when a smugly scented Omega notes that Tony might’ve finally found himself face down in a ditch after taking a dose of the latest party drug ( _the barest thread of disgust flowing under the words and snagging Rhodey’s attention, calling on him to agree, and he can honestly say he had never hated a person more viscerally than he hated him_ ). He lunges against the bodies of two of his own Omegas, desperately trying to soothe him, and finally starts bleeding fight all over the place. 

Rhodey's pack drags him home before things can get even worse, scenting ever so tentatively of confusion they can’t hide from an Alpha of his calibre ( _there’s worry swamping it, but it’s the confusion that sticks in Rhodey’s throat and makes him choke on resentment_ ). They try and calm him down once he's back in his own territory.

And Rhodey? He throws them out.

Somebody, he thinks as he paces the floors of the place he bought with Tony, should have TOLD him. They should have. There was no excuse.

He misses class and laughs bitterly when he gets emails from concerned professors and classmates ( _Tony almost never skipped anymore either, so why didn’t anyone TELL him, why wasn’t anyone ASKING_ ). He misses dinner and can tell his pack is hanging around just outside the door to his and Tony’s apartment. They're worried, however but there’s that underlying thread of confusion in them that has Rhodey’s door staying stubbornly shut.  
  
All this fuss was wasted on him. Nobody was doing the right thing. Nobody was doing ANYTHING.

Routine. Hours. Minutes. Seconds.   
  
Rhodey waits until the exact fucking minute Tony should have been showing up to the bar last night. 24 hours on the dot.

And then he sweeps back down to the police station, pack members falling into place behind him ( _they had his back. They did. No matter how much doubt tried to push its way in. They should've told him but they were here now_ ). Campus is tense and silent on their walk. Almost no one is wandering around outside.

It's satisfying, how wrong that feels.

They KNOW now. They KNOW Rhodey's their prime. They know what he’s missing. They know they’ve made a mistake.

And if that’s not the reason they’ve all scattered? If that’s not the reason they’re uncomfortable?

Rhodey will MAKE it the reason.

The campus police are less smug now. They are catching his anger though, teeth unconsciously baring, veins popping.

"24 hours.”  
  
Rhodey hisses, shoulders squared back and drawn up to his full height,  
  
“Where’s my Tony? Because you have 24 hours to find him.”

He leans all the way in to meet the Weak Omega desk jockey's eyes ( _he never used to know how to get what he wanted from people - was always taught to lead with quiet confidence. He knows now sometimes a gentle touch is wasted on idiots_ ),

“Don’t waste my time ever again.”

He growls. The desk jockey lunges before her superior can catch him ( _caught off guard by her reacting so strongly, probably_ ). Maya, Rhodey's best, slams her down by the throat as she tries to bite him and snarls at everyone else in the station.

She doesn’t smell confused at all. Instead protective fury is burning bright and fuelling Rhodey’s own.

There's a tense stand-off where most of the Weaker lineages are barely breathing, shifting closer to their Stronger members to hold them back. No one needs a campus scandal here. The police tell Rhodey to leave.  
  
They say they’ll call him back in if they need a character witness. As if Tony would ever have something to do with his own disappearance. As if, if he did, Rhodey wouldn’t already know everything about it and be getting him back ( _or gone with him_ ). 

Rhodey leaves. He’s sure his pack will deal with it in his stead ( _no longer confused, finally getting on the same page, because Tony was THEIRS too and they didn’t leave any of theirs in a lurch_ ).

( _That’s not entirely true_ )

( _Rhodey doesn’t know what to do and neither do they_ )

( _But he needs to go. He needs to be away. He needs to be alone before whatever tenuous grasp he has on himself slips entirely. He prides himself on control and this?? This is NOT control_ )

But they come back to him, feverishly beginning to put together dinner for two in the kitchen, to tell him he won’t be updated on the situation. He's not family. He's not pack.

**He wasn’t even there**

They have no reason to tell him anything. He has no legal reason to look for Tony.

Nobody who matters does ( _absent parents, no siblings-_ ).

Rhodey blanks. That concept just...doesn't connect. It doesn't make any sense.  
  
People tell him later that he had a stress meltdown that ended in one of his packmates calling Rhodey’s mom and the drywall in the kitchen needing replacement. He remembers talking to her as she soothed him and reminded him repeatedly that Tony has Jarvis. That Jarvis would know things. That Jarvis would share that information.

Still, that’s second hand, and as an Alpha? It rankles. It rankles worse than coming home to find his scent missing from Tony’s clothes.

HE should be out there retrieving his friend. He remembers thinking that and being unable to bring himself to dial.

His mom winds up calling Jarvis for him as he buries his face in Tony’s bed and turns over scenarios in his head. He’s scared shitless and, for all his organizational abilities, has no idea what to do when a friend is kidnapped. He's only 21. His oldest friends are barely in their 20s. Tony is younger than any of them.   
  
None of them know what to do.

He stews until his mom calls back and tells him Jarvis isn’t listed as pack. It's something Rhodey somewhat expected ( _something some guilty part of him is relieved to know_ ), but...

Jarvis isn't family, not an emergency contact - he’s nothing and he didn’t even know it ( _he’d insisted he should be on forms, but calling the school confirmed if he had been, he wasn’t anymore_ ).

Tony’s mother is near-catatonic, his father doesn’t answer calls from strangers ( _he tells the police: no ransoms and hangs up. Rhodey doesn't find that out for a long time_ )...

There's no one.

There's no one and Tony KNEW that. It’s what he was so afraid of. It’s what Rhodey was always trying to disprove.  
  
_(It’s the first time he ever truly comes to understand the scope of Tony’s otherness)_

( _It’s the first time he realizes that every time he turns a corner, he’s going to face another one of Tony’s walls. That is never going to change. He’ll probably never get through all of them_ )  
  
( _He'll never even find the reason all of them were built_ )

It's finally too much. Rhodey withdraws entirely from everyone as he hangs up and tries his best not to think ( _even as laying in bed reminds him viscerally of the wallowing he’d been doing when Tony had gone out all alone_ ). It doesn't work well.   
  
He's an Alpha. He's not built to do nothing.

Hours pass with Rhodey staring blankly into the dark, pack members restlessly shifting around just beyond the door, too affected by his emotions to go home ( _and by Tony’s disappearance, Rhodey knew Tony brought them balance, but God, some uncharitable part of Rhodey felt like they didn’t care. Nobody TOLD him after all - nobody NOTICED and nobody UNDERSTOOD_ ) They finally get shooed out by the floor CAs as time crawls towards sunrise, grey and unhappy, and Rhodey is alone.

A TV flickers with nothing interesting on it. Tony’s disappearance didn’t even make the news yet.

It's all...lifeless. Hollow.

And then a window cracks open and a person appears. One that smells like absolutely nothing

________

  
Being kidnapped was a strangely novel experience despite all of Tony’s simulations. Mainly because actual kidnappers were a lot less competent than trained agents. Partially because he had assignments due the next day. 

And, at least a little bit because Tony actually had someone to go home to this time ( _don't think about Rhodey. Don't think about Jarvis_ ).

He'd gone quietly enough when someone pressed a gun to his lower back ( _everyone, every high and mighty bastard, went for that spot. Tony had to wonder if everyone who hated him had a sixth sense for what made him uncomfortable_ ). He could have fought his way out of it, maybe, but he didn’t hold all the cards. He didn’t know how they knew he’d be out alone. His plans were pretty last minute and the event was niche at best.

There was vital information to be gained here ( _tenet 3 - them knowing something about him meant he had a chance to learn something about them_ ). 

That, and Tony was unfortunately not particularly bullet proof ( _he was working on that the second he got home_ ).

His kidnappers ushered him into a blandly Beta scented sedan, painted an unobtrusive shade of grey, and piled into the back holding him at gunpoint. All of them smelled like the same harsh deodorant to cover any traces of their real selves under something akin to 'burning chemistry lab'. Well, theoretically at least. It would only work against anyone who relied on their nose alone.

Even then, they really should test these kinds of things more thoroughly. All noses were not created equal.

Besides...

Gun #1 and his goons were posturing like mad. Every sweep of an arm and every attempt at looming hit Tony with another wave of bitter industrial chemicals. Alphas, the over-the-top lot of them. Probably not as Strong as their body language played them up to be - he wouldn’t be surprised if they had issues with aggression that they tried to normalize as ‘dominant behaviour’ ( _feeding into a stereotype that many students had complained to him about_ ). 

He'd be able to read them past any air-permeable barrier if they were anything like Rhodey's lineage ( _don’t think about Rhodey_ ). Though...one of them, which one...

There The driver! He was beginning to take on the slightest tinge of anxiety _(glancing constantly at Tony then away_ ).

Was he the leader of this little group? Were they even pack? It was hard to get a read on them in the scrubbed blank environment and with their obvious wariness.

Shifting gears now that he had the base information he wanted ( _the first bet, the first few chips on the table_ ), Tony focused on that anxious thread spooling off the driver. He wanted to make it worse. He had to hold his cards close to his chest for now, though, so he’d take a classic approach.

Tenet 1.

These people knew his schedule, but did they know the MIT version of him? A chatterbox with a bad attitude? The arrogant partyboy? One of his many talk-heavy personas? 

He shifted, the scrape of his loafers against the floor drawing attention to him. Tony inhaled obviously, jaw twitching, swallowing nervously - all physical signs he was about to speak. And, of course, none of them reacted.

Alphas, Christ, what was the point in learning to lie like this if they couldn’t even read a room?

Beta-fresh and squeaky clean, Tony let a hint of anticipation surround him, opening his mouth right as the drivers eyes darted to his in the rearview mirror. Detecting relief, Tony snapped his mouth shut. Glanced demurely down at his shoes and resolved to ignore any attempts to speak to him. Acted wholly unlike his MIT self.

There's a slight stir around him. The Alpha closest to him has crossed his arms over his chest and angled his chin down. The others had leaned visibly away from him and toward each other ( _adding another point to the 'possibly pack' category_ ). 

Sniffing delicately, Tony picks up hints of concerned distrust under the burning plastic of deodorant ( _he was going to stick coffee beans up his nostrils after this or something - ugh_ ). Breaking pattern had them jittery. Meaning they knew exactly which pattern he was breaking.

Now, did they know him personally or just through talk?

Tony would bet, he thought with a smirk ( _drawing no reaction again - Peggy would be bored to death with this lot)_ , that if they were operating on rumours alone they’d get their confidence back in no time flat. But if they cracked an hour into the silent treatment? Tony was going to stick around long enough to find every single scrap of information about them

Then he was going to destroy them.

( _They wouldn’t be able to slip into his sphere of influence ever again_ )

________

They crack in under an hour. Each of them peppers him with inane questions in the office building they’d tied him up in ( _zip tied to a chair like the amateurs they were_ ). The most nervous of them eye the doors with trepidation and search his body no less than three times in an increasing stages of panic.

"What are you hiding?”  
  
Their leader finally demands, three hours in, clutching a phone nervously to his chest ( _trying to decide whether or not to call in the ransom yet_ ), as Tony stares at him with a ghost of a grin on his face.

“I think...”  
  
Tony says, cocking a brow at the way each of them twitched anxiously,  
  
“That’s my question.”

This time his shark grin is large enough for them to understand even without playing on Beta pheromones.

“What are you hiding? Other than the fact that you’re MIT students, that is.”  
  
Tony asks.  
  
Switching masks is a smooth transition. He hopes it smells as unsettling as it looks ( _anxious submission to something a little more...aggressive_ ). To top it all off, two scraped and bleeding thumbs later, his hands are free.

His kidnappers are thoroughly unsettled now. Thankfully, it seems they fall on the flight side of fight or flight and Tony is leaning gleefully into their fear _(twisting it carefully with little barbs of compelling terror snarled up in Beta hostility_ ).

“Now, now,”  
  
Tony claps his raw hands together, ignoring the blood spatter that created,  
  
“Who here was dumb enough to keep ID on their person? There has to be one of you. There always is.”

The driver has gone white as a sheet. One of his men looks to him for help, unable to resist the pull of their connection ( _pack - he knew it_ ) and his leader’s own anxiety leaking steadily through his deodorant. 

Too easy, really.

“You.”  
  
Tony decides,  
  
"Let me see that."  
  
He charges right at the goon, dialling the terror gleefully up into blind panic, and watches in satisfaction as the man's hand slaps down over his chest pocket protectively. The others are frozen in fear, but the leader is beginning to move forward in a way Tony really doesn't approve of.

Everyone here has a weapon except for Tony. Technically, he’s at a disadvantage. However, most packs were only as good as their Strongest member ( _'When their is no guidance, a nation falls' he might not be hitting Mossad's level, but he could steal their motto just this once_ ).

Tony takes a leap of faith ( _they can’t ransom a man they kill - they probably won’t shoot him after getting this far, not when they are this nervous and shaky) and_ points Mr ID’s gun at the driver. Predictably, he freezes. His panicking men freeze, too, giving Tony’s wandering fingers time to find a wallet.

A wallet and a drivers license.

“If we got pulled over...”   
  
Mr ID whispers pleadingly at the driver, who is staring at him incredulously,  
  
“I didn’t want us to get arrested!”

"Oh, don’t worry about that.”  
  
Tony replied, slinging a friendly arm around the goon’s shoulders even as he kept the gun trained on the driver,  
  
“Something much worse is going to happen to all of you.”

Tony’s fingers dug painfully into the Alphas shoulder as he struggled ( _likely unnerved by the total lack of emotion he could read from Tony now...or the threats. It was probably the threats_ ).

“Now,”  
  
He bared his teeth at the driver of this crew of moron's in a parody of a smile,  
  
“Who is going to break into the local library with me? I’ve got some class records to dig through.”

________

  
It isn’t until Tony has managed to drive his stolen sedan back to Cambridge that a few stray thoughts become a torrent. He's been gone for longer than he meant to be ( _pulling IDs, records, faking withdrawal forms for a group of Alphas on slow shitty dial-up internet, printing and mailing those forms because for a tech school MIT was pretty insistent on having hard copies of everything - it was his own little version of Operation Bayonet_ ). 

Still, he could keep the mask in place. He could even have some fun. The whole experience hadn’t been that bad. 

It had gone perfectly, really. His training did what it was meant to. But looking at familiar ( _safe - no, not safe_ ) streets?

He couldn’t help the way his brain started preparing for the next catastrophe.

Rhodey was going to be furious. His professors were also going to be furious. He'd missed turning in a pretty critical assignment.

It has definitely been over 24 hours, which meant this incident might’ve been reported to his father despite the absence of any demands. Tony..didn’t want to know the results of that.

In fact, he suddenly found himself wishing viscerally this whole thing never happened.

There were a few hours that he just idled under a street lamp and mulled over every possible way he could try and erase this whole event. Ways to downplay it, ways to forget about it, a time machine to actually undo it-

It wasn’t until a raccoon knocked over a nearby trash can that he snapped out of disaster planning that was actually making the disaster worse ( _he was even later, now. Thank god no one had seen him just milling around uselessly_ ). 

He could face the music. He could compartmentalize this, be honest with Rhodey, maybe soothe his fears that if Tony ever got kidnapped again Tony could handle it just fine on his own. It would only be fair if he warned Rhodey of the rules in place if he was gone longer than five days ( _rules about ransoms, about calling in Peggy, about how to identify potential communications from him...well, that would have Rhodey more involved than Tony really wanted, so maybe not that_ ).

Yeah.

Yeah, he could do this. He'd probably have to do it again in the future anyway

Tony spots two of Rhodey’s Omegas as he approaches. They’re sleeping in front of the apartment door, curled on top of their coats, and Tony opts to take the window to his room instead. He COULD do this. Just...not right now.

Not while he was just the slightest bit unstable and sad.

( _Disappointment_ )

( _This feeling was one he’d been taught to recognize countless times in childhood - it’s disappointment_ )

________

  
It feels, for one agonizing second, like Rhodey’s heart is making an honest effort at escaping his chest. It strains forward with enough force that he chokes on a cry. Blinking back tears, he could swear he feels something else in him reaching forward too, trying to grab with crushing force onto the figure in the window.

"Tony."  
  
Slides from between his teeth on a ragged exhale. Tony’s silhouette freezes in place, then lifts a ( _bloody, Rhodey could smell the tang of it_ ) hand to his chest in an aborted motion.

“Rhodey?”  
  
Tony whispers. Then,  
  
“Why're you in my room?”

He feels too far away. Rhodey can’t see him well enough. Can't smell him.

And that’s unacceptable.

He heaves himself from the bed on unsteady legs, stumbling on pins and needles before he manages to crowd Tony away from the window and against the nearest wall.

“Tony,”  
  
He murmurs into his hair, nuzzling against it and cataloguing every suspicious scent clinging to him ( _memorizing them because he’s going to find whoever took his best friend, mark his words_ ),  
  
“Tony, fuck, it's been a day-“

Tony’s head ducks as he pulls on on Rhodey’s hands to his nose. He skims along a wrist in a motion that’s half-unsure, half-lingering, all Tony Stark in its awkward sincerity.

He was asking for safety ( _flipped wrists and Alpha sincerity, Rhodey’s protection, God he had failed him-_ ). He was asking for something Rhodey couldn't give.

Rhodey could change that, though. Make it so he’s never out of the loop again. Make it so he could find Tony anywhere as long as he got close enough, make it so he wouldn’t be held responsible for anything he did to find him, make it so people would KNOW.

He could, he could, he-

His wrist was shoved away and Tony’s face had gone sickly pale ( _stepping back and shuddering_ ).

"Stop."   
  
Tony hissed, pressing his hands to his mouth like he was going to be sick,  
  
"Calm down, please, you’re - too much. It’s too much. Effecting the way I feel-“

Blinking rapidly, Rhodey stumbled into the wall. He could feel the ghost of Tony’s warmth against it ( _against his wrist, too, which felt like it was burning_ ). Nausea rocked into him and he sank to his knees.

"It's ok, Rhodey, it’s ok. I’m back. I always knew this would happen - I’ve got measures for it. I’m fine. Got out all on my own!”

Tony...has been prepared? For this? For being alone? Taken alone?

Tony was prepared for being packless, always being packless, never having anyone, never planning to have anyone-

Rhodey’s blood was rushing in his ears

"You didn’t think,”  
  
He choked out,  
  
“That I’d come for you?”

There was a soothing hand on his back that wasn’t soothing at all ( _the contact burned and the nausea sharpened into a stabbing pain in his gut. Tony still didn’t smell like anything but chemicals and strangers. Why was he so flat? Not even Beta anything-_ ).

“You’re barely an adult, Rhodey. It’s not like I expect you to fight off hardened criminal - you do enough with jocks and drunks. I need you to - to calm down a little.”

Barely an adult? Tony wasn’t even 18 yet, but at 21, Rhodey was a kid. A Strong Alpha, a Prime of his own pack, but not enough to keep somebody like Tony Stark safe.

He's a proud man, so it’s no surprise that past the nausea rises a certain flavour of offence. It's ruthlessly crushed, however, when Rhodey realizes Tony is right.

He hadn’t needed Rhodey. He didn’t...he didn’t want him, either. That’s why Rhodey felt sick right now. Why they both felt sick. Because there’s was a wobbling claim dangling between the two of them that Rhodey couldn’t fucking let go of because he COULD help if he just had this.

Tony retches, but keeps rubbing blazing circles between Rhodey’s shoulder blades.

“I'm sorry,"  
  
He says, but he smells like nothing. Feels like nothing. And Rhodey feels like he’s stuck in a fever dream.

Tony drags him to bed, curls up by his side wordlessly, and the feeling doesn’t fade ( _Tony’s there. He’s there and he’s not present not really not in the ways that matter to instinct-_ ).

Rhodey’s reaching out into the dark, but nothing reaches back.

He's taking one step too far on a staircase he can’t see, feeling the sickening jolt before the fall, and it doesn’t stop.

( _He wonders if it ever will again_ )

________

  
Tony has to get Maya, the woman closest to having any semblance of control over Rhodey’s pack ( _the one who challenged Rhodey most from what he could tell_ ) in the chaos that ensues, to report his return to the campus police.

Rhodey won’t let him step foot outside of the apartment. He also won’t let anyone step foot inside. Awkwardly, Tony asks Maya to find some people to take notes for them both. He also hands her his overdue assignment with colour rising in his cheeks.

Her eyes are sad as she takes in the sight of him, bedraggled with bloody hands, and she extends a wrist in apology for all of it. From the kitchen, Rhodey snarls at her. She eyes him and keeps it out challengingly.

Quickly, as to not offended, Tony presses his nose to it and takes in the muddled blend of her feelings towards him ( _guilt, relief, loyalty, grief-_ ).

Rhodey’s snarl gets louder and Maya growls back.

Tony has to shut the door in her face. He's going to be too busy for the next hour trying to stem the tide of emotions Rhodey is bombarding him with to deal with anything else.

________

  
Three days in and no improvement. Rhodey keeps him close, drifts around behind him, and throws up pretty much anything he tries to eat. He's sickly and gaunt - keeps apologizing when he can’t quite seem to let Tony out of sight.

He doesn’t try to pretend he’s ok. 

They're both getting scared of what's going on. An ugly chasm hangs between them that Tony can’t bridge and Rhodey can’t stop pulling wider.

"I’m scared you’re going to disappear.”  
  
Rhodey whispers into his back, pressing his face there and shaking his head like he’s trying to shake off a bad dream,  
  
“You’re going to be gone like you were never here and no one will realize it. You’ll be alone and I’ll be alone, and no one will realize it at all.”

He keeps just...swelling with emotions before trying to sever them abruptly. It’s a bombardment that has something like a yes hanging on the tip of Tony’s tongue at its worst. Rhodey always cuts it off, though - throws himself into another room and presses his face hard into the blankets ( _“I can’t do that to you.” Tony has rarely heard Rhodey cry, “not knowing what I do. I can’t, I can’t let you leave either! I feel empty, Tones-“_ ).

Rhodey’s packmates hover outside the door every day after class, restless, fearful, catching snatches of twisting jealousy and misery. It makes Tony wonder if they’ll finally realize he’s more trouble than he’s worth. He also wonders if he should steer completely clear of Strong lineages for the rest of his life if this is what he’ll do to them ( _Rhodey was steadier that almost anyone he knew, but now his eyes were wilder than Peggy’s after her garden walks with notes scribbled on her skin_ )

________

  
It's Jarvis that finally puts an end to it. Rhodey’s snarls and waves of negative emotion don’t bowl him over like they would more sensitive Alphas or Omegas. He'd shared a house with Maria at her most unstable on top of being a Beta. He could endure.

He grabs Rhodey by the scruff, too weak already from stress to fight it, and throws him into an icy shower reminiscent of his first meeting with Tony. His howling can be heard through the entire building.

Soon after, Jarvis rips all the linens off the beds and stuffs them into bags for washing, opens all the windows, and sets cleaning supplies into the hands of every fool curious enough to poke their heads into through the finally open door.

“I want this place to smell like the inside of a lemon.”  
  
He tells them, face entirely unsettlingly blank,  
  
“And if I pick up even the slightest hint of that one’s meltdown, I will take all of these,”  
  
He gestures stiffly to the bag of linens,  
  
“And will hide them in your houses. See how you like having a meltdown.”

Everyone scatters quickly.

Tony just tries to stay out of the way, wide-eyed and uncomfortable with the connection he can still feel between himself and Jarvis ( _faded and hard to detect for others now, but still there. He’s always wondered if Rhodey could tell. He’s actually scared of the idea now despite desperately wishing Jarvis would touch him_ ). Jarvis turns sharply on his heel at the mere thought of it, like he could read Tony’s mind, and scowls.

"Young majesty,”  
  
He hisses,  
  
“If you value that haircut,”  
  
Tony did - it had taken forever to grow out his curls this long,   
  
“Then you will stay put. I have **things** ,”  
  
Things was definitely stressed - Tony was screwed,  
  
“To say to you.”

________

  
“You removed me as your emergency contact.”  
  
Disappointment had always been hard to stomach from Jarvis, but it was harder than ever with the butler's hands firmly wedged in his pockets ( _refusing even the slightest point of contact_ ).   
   
“I can take care of myself-“  
  
Tony tried to argue. He was cut off, though. 

“Master Stark.”  
  
Tony flinched - Jarvis has never called him that before,  
  
“If you ever, EVER, do that again,”

Jarvis squeezed his eyes shut and forcibly pulled his shaking fists from his pockets to fold them in his lap,

“If you ever do something like that again, I will get Peggy to microchip you in your sleep. I am far too old for this kind of scare.”

Arguments rose in Tony’s throat, ones that largely hinges on the fact that he didn’t want anyone to use Jarvis against him and he didn’t want the man to pay his ransoms, but they faded meekly away when he realized Jarvis' eyes were damp.

"Yes, sir.”  
  
He mumbled, the bond between them making the full force of Jarvis’ regrets smack him square in the face ( _a litany of fix it fix it fix it throbbing through him in time to the beat of his heart_ ).

"Don’t leave me behind to keep me safe, Young Majesty.”  
  
Jarvis said, struggling to collect himself,  
  
“And don’t leave that boy behind either.”

-Jarvis’ scent went flinty in a way that always reminded Tony that he’d been in wars once,

“I know what Peggy’s taught you.”  
  
He reprimanded, poking Tony hard in the chest,  
  
“That boy is an ally. He’s your chips on the table - brilliant, loyal, and wants to protect you. If you value that relationship at all, you’ll use him.”

“But-“  
  
Tony began again, only to be winded by another poke to the chest.

"He WANTS you to use him. Don’t be a fool, Tony. Don’t try and build all your friends from the parts of ones you’ve broken.”

________

  
Curled against Rhodey’s back ( _he’s absolutely silent. He hadn’t spoken since he’d gotten out of the shower_ ) in a scent-free apartment, Tony closes his eyes and focuses on the chasm between them. It's the gaping maw of some unknowable monster. Some untouchable future.

Tony can’t bridge it. He knows that - he’d thought Rhodey knew it, too. The least he can do is deal with it properly.

As an Omega. Or..just as himself ( _the almost-Omega almost-Second of the MIT Nerd pack, the best friend of their prime, a ragged-edged thing that wasn’t quite right_ ).

The rejection, when he lets it happen, is a sorry thing. It scents of sadness and a sense of lost possibilities, filling the room and settling heavily into the fabric of Rhodey’s MIT sweatshirt. It has Rhodey’s chest heaving as he retches sickly. It also has Rhodey rolling over and gathering Tony into his arms.

"Thank you.”  
  
He grinds out between coughs ( _even though that makes no sense because Tony has been hurting him all this time and was still hurting him now_ ).

It's odd, Tony thinks, feeling his confusion colour the air around them, drawing it into his lungs. Rhodey’s clammy hands clasp at his own in response.

"You didn’t have to be-“  
  
He struggles for words,  
  
“You didn’t have to - it’s comforting. To feel you. Even like this, even though you don’t like it, it’s - it’s something. Comforting, I mean. Irrationally.”  
  
He sighs and buries his face in Tony's neck, clearly breathing in all that rejection and confusion with intent,   
  
"You didn't have to do it like this, but you did. So thank you. For doing it as yourself." 

Tony blinks and tries not to let that get under his skin ( _tries not to pull his pheromones and emotions and his EVERYTHING back underneath the surface to strangle them all over again_ ). He’ll never be quite right to the instinctual parts of Rhodey. He'll never be quite right to anyone at all.

At least Rhodey was honest about it. He always was.   
  
Flipped wrists and Alpha sincerity. 

( _At least Tony knew, now, what he could have with him and what he couldn’t_ )

________

  
The months following are...strange. Dreamlike. Defined by being physically closer than ever, yet distant in a way they’ve never had to really feel before.

( _Rhodey admits to tony once and only once that he feels helpless_ )

( _After that, he only comments on the fact that Tony is strong. He’s wrong, and Tony knows what he really means, but they don’t talk about it)_

They film a science series together, roping in half the campus, and Tony can barely manage to pretend it’s not an awkward apology. Rhodey can barely manage to pretend it’s not a desperate attempt to gather proof: proof Tony is here, proof he makes this pack happy, proof that they need him.

They jokingly release it to the materials department as teaching material: how to use the absolute worst things possible to successfully build machines. Tony was most proud of the soft gelatin industrial fan two of Rhodey’s youngest members had slapped together on some unholy caffeine bender. It makes him feel good, mostly.

For Rhodey’s birthday, Tony flies him out to the set of his favourite soap opera and gets Maya ( _someone he found beside him more often than not lately_ ) to film Rhodey crying over it. She even dubs it over with some funny commentary before giving it back to Tony to mail to Rhodey's family. 

Tony’s pretty sure he wasn’t worn entirely his own clothes since the kidnapping. He’s been swaddled in pack gear constantly. None of them complain about it - some of them even seem really into it - and so he lets himself relax enough to enjoy the feeling of being cared for. He finds other people’s clothes more comfortable than his own, really. It makes Rhodey’s mom laugh, anyway ( _he’d been a bit worried for awhile that she’d never laugh around him again. Her expression was always smooth, Alpha though she was, but her scent was so sad when he came around. She couldn’t stop leaving soothing marks all over Rhodey, either_ ).

Rhodey even finally snipes at him about not doing the dishes. It’s nice to see him looking at dirty coffee mugs like they were a bad thing ( _instead of refusing to let Tony remove them_ ).

And then Howard drops by for the first time in three years.

________

  
"Listen to me, boy-“  
  
His father’s fingers prod harshly at Rhodey’s chest, backing him up against the front door of their apartment,  
  
“You think my son is ‘worth more than ransom money’? That I should pay off lowlife criminals?”

He laughs, grating and low, and the stink of him feels like splinters of fiberglass ( _Tony’s gnarled hand throbs in sympathy with his nose_ ),

“That I should have a heart of gold and just assume the best of kidnappers? No.”  
  
Howard smirks at the snarl on Rhodey’s lips,  
  
“Gold is soft and silver is brittle. Money isn’t the issue. My HEART isn’t the issue.”

There’s something so wrong about seeing Howard turn that condescending attitude on someone who isn’t Tony. On someone who had tolerated it from far more people than he should have to - on a good man who didn’t have the money or connections to make Howard eat his words.

“People are the issue. Some day, boy,”  
  
Howard spits,  
  
“You’ll know the value of iron.”

________

"You're nothing like that piece of shit."   
  
Rhodey is pacing the apartment like he hasn't since their first year ( _growing more self-assured every day he found a way to tear down the barriers people put in his way_ ),   
  
"The Hell was he even on about, anyway? I swear half of that wasn't even related to me insulting his parenting."  
  
"It's a family motto."   
  
Tony sighs, knowing that the next time he's at home is going to be so much worse than usual,   
  
"Stark men are made of iron. It's all about being unyielding even when people think there's no 'value' in it."  
  
Rhodey snorts, whirling around to pick up the prototype capstone Tony's been building pretty much since he got to MIT,   
  
"This isn't iron. It's not iron because that's stupid. Iron sucks"   
  
He pats the prototype softly ( _even though he's angry. It's why Tony trusts him_ ),   
  
"Your dad sucks."  
  
"You're not wrong."   
  
Tony tells him, smiling wanly, and doesn't tell him about all the things his dad has been right about. He doesn't think Rhodey will understand. He's happy he doesn't.

________

  
It’s almost funny that Tony is kidnapped again the next day. Somebody probably followed his dad to his address ( _fancy that_ ).   
  
Howard’s iron will policy sure didn’t seem like a deterrent now. If anything, these guys were taking it as a challenge

They’d noticed Tony’s scarred hand immediately. They’d...made a point of it. An unforgettable point.

Oddly enough, this time is almost better than the first. It’s worse in a lot of ways, don’t get Tony wrong, but...

He's been through simulations of exactly this before. It’s familiar. There’s comfort in that ( _in not having to think - not as himself_ ).

He gets out just after the five day mark through ingenuity and incredibly targeted taunts laying the groundwork for distraction. It's some of his best work, he thinks.

He's met by Rhodey and his pack before he can even pass back into Cambridge. It actually stops him dead in his tracks, blinking a stream of blood from his eyes ( _he’d tried to wipe it, but his missing fingernails just added to the mess_ ) as he dazedly takes in his best friend’s grim expression.

Unable to resist the idea that something else has gone wrong in his life, he prods around inside himself to test for the presence of another chasm ( _or for the cracks between him and Rhodey he knows are there, even if they don’t know up on a pheromone test)._ There’s something, but it’s not a vast empty space. Whatever it is feels impossibly thin.

However, his prodding doesn’t break it. His recoiling from it doesn’t break it either.

The drive home is filled with the pack's excited chatter about Rhodey mobilizing a search ( _somebody had clearly been doing his research. God, how had Tony not noticed?_ ), pulling together connections from all over the community and their connections several cities over, all to find traces of Tony. Rhodey’s expression isn’t particularly proud, but he smells calm enough that no one but the Betas note it. 

Internally, Tony turns his attention away from the chatter ( _and the overwhelming...something that makes him feel, adoration rising thick enough in his throat to drown him_ ). Instead he lets a little piece of himself touch the wire again, a small enough puff of Omega that it would be invisible to anything but a micrometer, and waits. 

Rhodey twitches.

Stares at him wide-eyed and startled, a hand hovering just over his chest.

There's something in the space between them. A half-formed thing that’s strong as steel and strange as zircon.

________

  
At home, at Rhodey’s home with his mother and sister, Tony proves it’s not a claim with several rejections. Not a bond - not the important kind, but not quite the technical bond, the plain friendly kind Tony allowed, either. Rhodey doesn’t smell claimed. Doesn’t feel any more like he belongs to Tony or like Tony needs to touch him. Doesn’t show the signs of increased attachment or even noticing Tony’s barest hints of Beta scent from across a room without straining himself.

However, they can both feel it. There's something.

Quietly, they both resolve to let it lie. They won’t have to get rid of it if they never figure out what it is.

________

  
In the dull light of dawn, Rhodey presses the heels of his palms to his eyes until he sees stars. Campus had gone crazy when Tony was gone. It was impossible to hold student attention long for the professors of the Nerd Pack. They’d all been sent home by the end of the second day - formal bulletin about it and everything.

They didn't go home, of course. Instead, they'd all been absorbed into the information network he’d been painstakingly cobbling together from Tony’s drunken spy stories ( _ones that were REAL, somehow, despite Tony having no reason to know them in the detail he did_ ). That same network was whipped into shape by Peggy Carter a mere two hours after the five day threshold was passed ( _she’d eyed him as they approached the border of Cambridge with consideration, and then she had left to find Tony’s father. He didn’t know what to make of it - of her not staying. Not calling Tony, either. What did she know that he didn't?_ ).  
  
They'd all fixated pretty well on their shared goal this time. A well-oiled machine, even if it was headed by an amateur. They'd found Tony Stark.

Tony Stark, missing three fingernails off his damaged hand, reeking of someone else’s fear (r _aw terror and pain and all the things that go bump in the night_ ). 

Tony Stark, crawling straight into Rhodey’s bed when he got to his parent's home, pressing his nose to Rhodey’s wrist in the car even as he blinked blood out of his eyes.

Tony Stark, connected to him by something at last.

Rhodey presses harder against his eyes. He presses until it hurts.

He did this when he was watching the news, too, watching updates on the search for his best friend in real time because the police couldn’t be assed to call him. Because they turned him away just like they did the first time, only now citing that they had too many minor student crises now to deal with his. He was pretty sure he was banned from the station for life after what followed ( _resentment bubbling hot and thick in his stomach_ ).

This time, he doesn’t feel the same nagging sensation of absence, the one he got when he forgot his bag or something in the kitchen was out of place, that had bothered him for months after the first time ( _he was still a little weird about the mugs. He wished he wasn't_ ). He doesn’t feel the crippling sense of devastation that always came with realizing Tony was never going to ‘whole’ and that their relationship was always going to have holes.

Because this time Tony came to him - this time, he gave Rhodey tools that he could use to find him, this time he connected well enough with others that they LOOKED.

Even though Rhodey couldn’t save him - could the return the favour quite like he wanted to...

It was something. And Rhodey had always been good at making the best of 'something'. 

________

  
Roberta Rhodes fusses over the both of them. Her scent is still sad, day after day, and it’s driving Tony insane ( _he can tell something...more happened this time when he was gone. No one was all that worried the first time, but now he keeps finding people driving al the way out to Rhodey’s just to comb their fingers through his hair. He also has some...concerning emails from his professors_ ). He wishes she wasn’t sad for them. He wishes there was nothing to be sad about.

She catches his arm one night and drags him into the kitchen. She’s a force to be reckoned with - towering over him at nearly six feet flat and a large woman at that- and he’s properly cowed. She doesn’t flip her wrists for him, but she does hug him.

“I don’t know what there is between you and Jim,”  
  
She tells him, solemn and heavy ( _her pheromones bearing down on him and making him sneeze because, wow, ok, Alpha as Hell_ ),  
  
“But I think if it was gone it’d hurt you more than it already does. So I’ll take care of you both - make it easier. Ok?”

Tony feels...some kind of way at that offer ( _demand_ ). Awkward, maybe. Definitely overwhelmed.

He's horrified to find himself blinking back tears as Roberta stares him dead in the eye with an impassive expression, saying,

"I consider you a son, Tony Stark. Which means no more shenanigans - not if you can help it.”  
  
Tony never gets the chance to respond. Rhodey’s little sister, Lila, bounds into the room to distract him and Roberta absolutely refuses to let him catch her alone for the rest of the week.

The only thank you he manages he give her is a new fridge and graciously accepting a kiss on the forehead before he heads back to school. It doesn't feel like enough, but nothing he's ever done for the Rhodes family has.

  
________

  
After that there’s Spanish songs with their favourite bus driver, memorizing them all and teaching them to the pack as callsigns, and getting motorcycles when their driver retires ( _his family moving to a different state, singing sweet songs of warmer weather and sparkling water_ ). Rhodey pays for the bikes with the impressive PhD package he’s offered in conjunction with some Air Force deal for the next year ( _accelerating him straight out of school in two years tops_ ). Tony’s never gotten a gift like this from him before, and winds up painting both their bikes to even their score.

There's concerts and the completion of Dum-E’s A.I. There’s the award ceremony for that and Jarvis’ proud tears, his scent markings that lasted for mere hours, his gift of cakes and dry Britishisms to Roberta on their first real meeting.

There's a visit from Peggy, haggard yet sunny, and a package from Fury that contained an unhackable program that turned out to be a homing beacon.

There's still a sense that something isn’t quite right between himself and the rest of the campus, but it’s overlooked in favour of success and something that smells a bit like home. It's calm.   
  
It feels like a disaster is on the horizon a little more every day.  
  
Tony desperately shoves the sensation of things being TOO GOOD away. He makes a skeleton of code. The first inklings of a new A.I., a gift for the person who gave Tony his first relationship, something of a joke _(building his own friends)._ But the feeling looms more heavily than ever by the time Tony goes home for Christmas.

His mother is more lucid than he’s seen her in years and it scares him. His father is hazier. That scares him, too. He's moved on from alcohol to something worse.

Jarvis drives them to a gala with a grim look on his face, one Tony's too anxious to even consider going to, and he waits up for them until the sun is rising outside. It's a grey day. Overcast.

It reminds him of the last time something terrible happened ( _Rhodey, wide-eyed in the dark as he waited for Tony to come back home, panicking as he slipped in the window_ ).   
  
Maybe that's why he's not surprised when there's a knock on the door and flashing lights outside the window.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It has...been awhile. Worldbuilding is hard when you step away from it for this long, but I have tried my best! Hopefully I get back into the groove.
> 
> Rhodey’s freakout during that first kidnaping is pretty bad for several reasons. A pretty big one is that this is from his perspective and, quite frankly, if anyone else is panicking he is NOT noticing. Beyond that though, there's more going on than Rhodey realizes. He's of a Stronger lineage than almost any of them and is much more likely to have a hair-trigger response to somebody close to him experiencing distress or a potentially distressing scenario. He’s also closer to Tony and has an awareness that Tony is an Omega, making him even more protective on top of being a Strong Alpha. He tries to rationalize his anger at his packmates by thinking they should at least recognize Tony as a Second since he KNOWS they don't know he's an Omega, but lets be real: what he's really pissed about is that Tony, as far as his Alpha instincts are concerned, has been acting as his Omega Second and it's REALLY OBVIOUS. It's fucking rude that no one recognizes him as what he is!! Of course, even with the Nerd Pack's suspicions, it isn’t enough to drive the kind of instinctual freakout Rhodey is having. The anger is really wholly irrational on Rhodey's part. 
> 
> He mostly thinks everyone has learned their lesson the second time things go down, but he’s not...entirely right? Rhodey’s influence is pretty large and he primed a lot of people for a meltdown with his first one months ago. Faced with the same situation and a lot of the same emotions from Rhodey, especially in the absence of Tony’s stabilizing influence, they take it pretty badly. He's not entirely wrong either - Tony's gone longer this time + this is the SECOND TIME so obviously people would be more inclined to panic.
> 
> Tony is disappointed upon returning home because ultimately he was right - being a ‘Beta’ and having gone through stress training made this situation work out well for him. Basically it gave some justification to his fathers treatment of him and the bad things he’s experienced. He doesn’t want to acknowledge that on basically any level, but tony in CBT-verse is pretty well attuned to emotions and categorizing (and compartmentalizing) them, so he can’t completely ignore that he feels disappointed. 
> 
> Any thoughts on why Peggy ditched Rhodey? I'm always curious about what people are thinking as they read.

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this story is "First Burn" after the gorgeous new Hamildrop piece and the chapter titles are lyrics from the song! This whole series has a little bit of a musical theatre bent to it.


End file.
